10.0 : "What It All Means"

In Ch. 10 Richardson summarizes the primary takeaways and implications of the preceding material. My first question is whether he meant the last sentence of the chapter to be incomplete or if an error made it past the publishing team. On P. 155 in the section titled "Just the Beginning" the final paragraph (in my copy) reads "If you have come this far, I'm hoping you have a new box of tools and techniques to take full advantage of the opportunities this new Internet presents. Here is where the real learning,"... Yes, it ends with a comma, making me wonder how he was going to qualify his meaning for "real learning" before he ended with a verb like "begins". Of course, he continues to write prolifically, and I have a good sense of what he might say.

He asserts that the most important impact on education of the Read/Write Web will be the response of classroom teachers (p. 154), as he re-uses the word "classroom" in the sentence to apply to the context of the Web rather than the brick-and-mortar space, and in the following paragraphs breaks down what he means by saying that this new "classroom" requires a redefinition of what it means to teach:

• to connect content and people, modeling strategies of finding relevant and worthwhile content and using primary sources in the classroom, including people as primary sources
• to create content in the form of blogs, podcasts, wikis, and to create and sustain PLNs
• to collaborate with other teachers and with students
• to coach, modeling the skills that students need to be successful, helping to motivate them to strive for excellence
• to function as agents of change as the transparency induced by Web 2.0 use threatens the formerly dominant paradigm.

8.0 Podcasting, Video & Screencasting

I found this chapter of Richardson's to be particularly useful. Among his video tips is the suggestion (p. 122) that when buying a digital video camera, one should make sure that the camera has an external input for a microphone, so that one has the option to run an extra long mic extension cord and use an informal boom mic for better audio quality. He recommends the work of Marco Torres, originally from San Fernando (CA) High School. I found Marco's current work at pushcreativity.com, and additional resources from his group with specific advice on equipment for documentary work at schools at http://alasmedia.wikispaces.com/ACOT+2+Documenting+Wiki. It made me want to share with recent graduates continuing filmmaking studies, to get their feedback on his advice.

Looking for John Udell's screencast about Wikipedia (p. 123), I stumbled upon another blog about Richardson's book with several handy links. For Ch. 8 see http://buildingbloggers.blogspot.com/2010/10/chapter-8.html. I discovered watching the screencast that I had seen it a few years ago in a lesson on the reversion of vandalism in Wikipedia, but now I was watching more from the perspective of how efficiently the screencast is made, with no unneeded screen material and quick pacing. Although Richardson goes on to describe the potential of streaming content, it's my sense that unless we can provide local hosting the bandwidth demands are too great for our systems most of the time. It's my hope that that constraint will diminish sooner rather than later.

7.0 Flickr

The primary issue I had with Richardson's Flickr chapter had not to do with his content but with local decision-making as to student access. For example, when he suggests (105) that we work with students to create a discussion through the comments on particular images, I agree that that idea has a lot of potential. However, until we collectively find an appropriate way to filter Flickr content to make the site permissible for student use at school, we'll have to use other tools to do that (e.g., Edmodo or a wiki, with images embedded).

Flickr provides a rich set of Creative-Commons licensed resources (109). See http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/.  The attribution license, in particular, allows remixing and mashing of shared content (creating derivative works). CreativeCommons.org provides descriptions for the various licenses and when to use them, as well as tools for creating licenses to embed in one's sites (see my fun blog for an example). I also appreciated Richardson's sharing of Alan Levine's Delicious tags under Flickr ( http://delicious.com/cogdog/flickr ).

6.0 Social Web: Learning Together

Among the useful or interesting things Richardson shared in Ch. 6 was a tinyurl link to an old wiki on Twitter Collaboration by Nancy White (now writing here: http://www.fullcirc.com/ ). In her recent work she shares "some of the Twitter chats could serve as a model for a mobile-based distributed conversation by a community as well! Here are some examples in education", which links to the 9/11/12 Edudemic article on the Top 50 Twitter educational hashtags/chats. I've used #edchat before but some of the others were new to me and seem worth sharing. The chat descriptions are Edudemic's:

36. #tichat:

    On Thursdays at 8 p.m. EST, tech-savvy educators can discuss the latest in educational technology.

37. #lrnchat:

    Through #lrnchat’s discussion on Thursdays and Fridays, you’ll be able to learn about social media’s role in education.

38. #casesmc:

    Discuss the advancement of social media in higher education on #casemc, hosted bimonthly on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST.

39. #TalkTech:

    Delve into social learning on the #TalkTech chat as participants share articles and ideas on learning technology Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET.

44. #langchat:

    All about language education, #langchat is a great place to talk about language learning each Thursday at 8 p.m. EST.

45. #scichat:

    On Tuesdays from 9 p.m.to 10 p.m. EST, educators and scientists take to Twitter to share science ideas and discuss science education.

46. #mathchat:

    A great chat for anyone interested in math, #mathchat is hosted Fridays from 1 to 2 p.m. GMT.

47. #engchat:

    Learn about English education through this lively Twitter chat, Mondays from 7 to 8 p.m. EST.

48. #musedchat:

    Designed for college students in music education, you can join #musedchat on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET to discuss resources and issues in music education.

49. #artsed:

    Explore creativity in education through #artsed’s chat on Thursdays from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. EST.

50. #sschat:

    All about social studies, #sschat brings together social studies educators, students, and other interested parties each Monday at 6 p.m. EST.

I agree that Diigo beats the pants off Delicious for annotating and sharing educational links, but I've also got a significant investment in my Delicious links and tags which will be hard to replicate in Diigo. Both sets of mine want curating and culling to bring them up-to-date. Among the more useful sets are ones I put together for colleagues, including http://delicious.com/msporteratfhs/challenger
and http://delicious.com/msporteratfhs/crucible, and for classes, like http://www.diigo.com/list/kathleenporter/diversity-education.

5.0 (RSS)

I've liked RSS capabilities for a long time, but I've found that I accrue more feeds than I can possibly read. I think of the habit as a kind of digital hoarding, like collecting Read It Later tags or popping sites into Google Reader, wondering if I'll ever come back to the site I've marked. I let my Diigo groups email me when they're updated, sometimes as a weekly digest, but just like I don't want to try to catalog the whole world, I can't read my whole Twitter timeline any more -- and when I tied my Delicious to FriendFeed I found I started getting more correspondence than I wanted. In the next paragraph I share some thinking on advisors to help with digital overload, and RSS feeds from their blogs.

Richardson (p. 81) describes ways to include RSS feeds in our Weblogs. Blogger has made that easy with its current gadgets. I've added (on the right) three posts each from three bloggers. David Weinberger's written Everything Is Miscellaneous, and Clay Shirky's shared Cognitive Surplus, among other work. The Heath brothers wrote Switch. Among these and others, I think the most urgent for me to read is Howard Rheingold's NetSmart, in which he provides advice on cutting the Internet into a manageable size (like eating an elephant one bite at a time). In describing his most recent work Rheingold says

Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I've been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what I've learned.

So RSS feeds do not equal social media, but I believe similar principles of mindfulness and avoiding overwhelm apply.

3.1

Found this while I was reading about the efficacy of blogging as a way to help students learn about writing, publishing, and responsibility, related to the material in Chapter 3. It's a recent blog post from GigaOm, by Ki Mae Huessner, summarized as follows:

As digital learning platforms continue to personalize education, McGraw-Hill SVP Jeff Livingston believes schools, particularly at the high school level, will need to rethink grouping students by age and instead organize students by competency.

Apparently Livingston participated in a virtual roundtable with reporters

http://gigaom.com/2012/09/27/mcgraw-hill-exec-tech-will-make-us-rethink-age-grouping-in-schools/

4.0 (Wikis)

Richardson quotes Steve Jobs in his chapter on wikis in the discussion of the reliability of Wikipedia as a resource (pp. 59-60), saying that Jobs called it one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world. (His tinyurl link to the Wikiquote page of quotes from Jobs no longer includes that particular reference: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs, although the page has lots of other gems which would be easy to be distracted by. One of my favorites: "'Real artists ship.' An old saying at Apple Computer, attributed to Steve Jobs, meaning that it is important to actually deliver."

Richardson goes on to say that using Wikipedia as a resource ultimately "takes a faith that collectively we can produce information that is as high quality as what a few trusted produced in the past." He wrote that at least three years ago... I find that I sometimes prefer crowd-sourced nonfiction materials as being more recently updated by a more diverse group. In an early post I referred to Stack Overflow, Metafilter or Quora as information sources I'm exploring. A recent ACRL article by David Lewis, Dean of the Indiana University - Purdue University Indiapolis Library, spoke to the "Inevitability of Open Access". The material is shared with a CC BY-NC license, and here's the abstract [the full-text .pdf is also available through that link]:

Open access (OA) is an alternative business model for the publication of scholarly journals. It makes articles freely available to readers on the Internet and covers the costs associated with publication through means other than subscriptions. This article argues that Gold OA, where all of the articles of a journal are available at the time of publication, is a disruptive innovation as defined by business theorist Clayton Christensen. Using methods described by Christensen, we can predict the growth of Gold OA. This analysis suggests that Gold OA could account for 50 percent of the scholarly journal articles sometime between 2017 and 2021, and 90 percent of articles as soon as 2020 and more conservatively by 2025.

This refers to open access to scholarly content as opposed to crowd-sourced content as facilitated by wikis (for example) -- peer-reviewed material by scholars who may share rights using models like those offered with Creative Commons licenses. I've noticed aspects of the scientific community talking about speeding up the process of discovery and breakthrough by opening their work earlier to more people, in a way not only reminiscent of the craving for speed reflected in Ward Cunningham's choice of the word wiki in 1995 (p. 55), but literally paralleling early wiki development such as that of Wikipedia itself. I took a quick side-trip to see if I could find the Twitter accounts for one of these scientists, but that's going to take a little longer to research. Once I find a few I'll add them to my link list.