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.

3.0 ["Weblogs: Let's Get Started"]

Two things I appreciated from this chapter: at the end Richardson reproduces Blogger's "Good Educator's Blogs". Not all the links are necessarily the same, as some have moved hosts, but the authors remain:

• David Warlick
• Clay Burrell
• Chris Lehmann
• George Siemens
• Jeff Utecht
• Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach
• Stephen Downes
• danah boyd
• Tom Hoffman
• Vicki Davis
• Shelly Blake-Plock
• Clarence Fisher

If/when I make time I'll link to their current blogs/Twitter handles/FB pages/WordPress/Tumblr/Instagram/websites or whatever tools they're using, but I find I read at least one of these people every week. Making one's voice heard in education and technology is easy, nowadays, and most of these folks have found multiple outlets.

Another thing I liked from the chapter was (p. 45) Richardson's suggestion to have students start with reading blogs before writing. The same principle applies as students learn to write in other media and forms -- for example, to help students become poets we encourage them to read poetry, and to help them become musicians we expect them to listen to a variety of musical styles. He says "good blogging starts with good reading", and I would extend that to incorporate evaluating for authority and other aspects of value as they learn to craft their own blogs.

Links from Web Tools deluge class -- Thank You, Keri!!

• Tweet This! Ideas for using Twitter in the classroom!
• Pinterest - use Pinterest to learn reading skills and strategies in the elementary classrom
• Using Wallwisher - ideas for the classroom
• **Socrative** - student response system - go to site and use room #: 02035007 to log in and respond to the classroom quiz
• Class Dojo - keep students inline using this easy student behavior site/app
• Online interactive timelines (Dipity, Timetoast) - Read about uses of timelines in the classroom
• Issuu - Creating your own magazine/books and publishing them! Tell me more!
  • 4th grade classroom creates "tall tales" using Story Jumper and then "publishes" them to Issuu

2.2

The Blogs as Resources section of the chapter spells out some criteria for assessing blogs for "accuracy and trustworthiness" (Richardson 2010, p. 37). He articulates in detail principles which are key to information literacy in general, whether the source is print or online, blog or other site; they are particularly specific to blogs, but I believe he does a good job of explaining them and the reasons for them, and I'm gratified that they're close to what I've been teaching. Some of the folks he features in the chapter have retired or moved on to other things.

Here are some of the key steps from the section as I've highlighted them, plus my reflections:

1. "Try to find out as much as you can about the author of the Weblog. See if there is an 'About' link that will lead to a name..." He mentions Google, and identifying background, profession, authority, and domain publisher. I've enjoyed a side trip into domain registration and learning about ICANN (the text mentions its predecessor InterNIC).  I find more and more I like to use Quora or Stack Overflow for crowd-sourced opinions on sites and tools, including WhoIs services.
2. "Next, you may want to find out what kind of a reputation the blogger has among his peers." He mentions Technorati's "Authority" rating, as well as sites linking to a blog.
3. Blogroll on the blog, especially to determine bias or agenda; other posts on the blog, and accuracy of analysis or synthesis from source links. This last is one of my favorites for evaluating whether the blogger is providing value-added or just content-farming.

Critical thinking as to authority (and to relevancy and other factors we'll explore in this text or elsewhere) is a key 21st-century skill our students need to acquire for college and career readiness as well as for effective citizenship.

Begin with the end in mind...

The truth is, I started reading this book by reading the Epilogue. I would never do that with fiction, just like I avoid film spoilers, but with this book I thought it would give me context on where we were headed -- and it did. Richardson spells out a vision for an inspiring, productive teacher who truly helps his students learn and makes progress alongside his colleagues by making wise use of available technologies. I'm glad I started my approach this way, because it gave me a context of the ideal into which to fit the details provided in each chapter as we proceed.

2.1

I've been using one of the Blogger gadgets, the Link List, to catch links as I go from reading Richardson's text, calling them "Related Sites". When I find broken links or 404s from the text links I sometimes check for an updated link and use that instead -- it's not surprising that some of the tinyurls for student work sites would no longer function. Although some of the tinyurls failed, searching for them led me to handy online lists of links from the text, like the one from one of Karen Gallagher-Edlund's (McCaskey East HS, Lancaster PA) wikis at http://edw2010.wikispaces.com/Online+class+notes.

As Richardson talked about the many uses of Weblogs in schools,

• class portal
• online filing cabinet
• e-portfolio
• collaborative space
• knowledge management and articulation
• school Web site,

I was struck by how often we now employ other Web 2.0 tools for these functions. Tools like Edmodo and Digi[cation], as well as wikis and our official FPS websites, provide for many of these uses while offering other advantages, such as enhanced privacy or more options for collaboration.

1.2

Further reacting to Will Richardson's R/W Web chapter:

Learners as Teachers bullets (3rd ed., p. 9)

• What are your passions?
• Who are your teachers? Are they all in physical space?
• How are you building your own learning networks using these tools?
• In this new environment, how are you modeling your learning for your students?

I'm not going to attempt to fully answer these questions here, but rather take them as starting points.

1) My passions include solving problems and puzzles, listening, connecting with people, and learning (about anything and everything, as far as I've found so far). I get particularly excited when I witness an "aha" moment in another learner. In terms of my scope of interests, I notice that when I don't pursue something it's typically out of a sense of prioritizing needs (like helping the person in front of me, or eating, sleeping, etc.).

2) Many of my teachers are not in physical space nearby (although they are extant, incarnate, somewhere). Others are writers or teachers who have gone before, or people I've worked with, or people I work with now.

3) See below for list of tools -- my own PLNs might be represented with something like a 3- or 4-D Venn diagram, with connecting spheres depending on platform and focal points. For example, I use a Librarians group on Facebook, as well as Twitter-following some of the same people. I also use Twitter for other topics, interests, and groups, sometimes organized into lists. Because Twitter lists are like Gmail labels, I can flag some librarians (for example) as educators, or some Tweeting administrators for ed-news. I have more inputs and feeds than I can realistically process at the moment, so I use filters (like VIPs in Mail on the Mac) to make sure key data comes to my attention.

4) Among the ways I model learning for my students is by thinking out loud as we solve problems together (like math, with someone today), by publishing to a limited extent ( @KathleenPorter, or an earlier blog Ms. Porter @ F.H.S. ), and by being honest when we're figuring something out together (like setting up several classes with Edmodo last week).

1.1

My first impression of Richardson's Read/Write Web chapter was that he cited the right sources. He started in 1989 with Tim Berners-Lee, as described in Andy Carvin's synopsis of his speech on the Semantic Web at the MIT Tech Review Emerging Technologies Conference in September 2004. The link from the third edition of the book to the source article is already broken, but I found it posted on Carvin's site at Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web. Carvin describes the talk Berners-Lee gave at MIT that month, including the following:

Berners-Lee’s early remarks focused on his development of the Web. “Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet,” including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. “All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant…. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web… and the idea was that it would minimally constraining.” And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be “the cloth on which a tapestry would be made – the jewels, the colors…”

Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, what’s come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking – and more recently, wikis and blogs. “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write…. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows they’re [embracing] its creative side.”

Carvin continued to write up Berners-Lee's "90-minutes-worth in 30 minutes" talk, concluding with his comments about the Web and education (remember, this is Sept. 2004):

As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. “I’d like to see lots of curricula like the MIT Open Courseware initiative being picked up by K-12,” he said. “The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as “The Font of All Knowledge”) . You really need to keep education materials sown together. So I’d love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but I’d [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it.”

“Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other,” he concluded. “And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There’s lots of work to do out there.”

This put me in mind of Randy Paush's work at Carnegie-Mellon with Alice -- and, of course, our work in our current class together.