Subscribing to YouTube RSS Feeds
I’m back in Banff and pretty happy about it. Anyone who’s been here before would understand. Here’s a link to the photos I’ve taken (and still taking) in the Canadian Rockies. On Thursday, it was TEDxBANFF, which was a singular treat for me (more here). Then, after Friday up in Edmonton, I’m back in Banff for the last day of “Alberta Future,” a conference by the CTS Council (Career & Technology Studies). I was impressed with a video that the council produced as a preview to the conference.
I’ve decided to change my closing keynote a bit, from my typical delivery of “Rebooting the Basics” to some of the learning literacies of the 21st century, specifically tapping into the ongoing and global conversations related to pathway careers being added to Alberta’s curriculum.
One of the specific avenues to knowledge I’d like to include is subscribing to YouTube videos based on a YouTube search. The barrier I’m having to question my way through is the fact that YouTube seems not to have a convenient display of their RSS feeds in the same what that Google’s news and blog searches do. So I did some blog searches, and found a post in the Google Operating System blog, “YouTube Feeds.”
So, to have a resource with instructions, I’m posting this blog entry to link to in my online handouts:
- If you are looking for the latest YouTube videos related to robotics, or any other topic, then you start with the base feed URL:
- Simply add the search term, robotics, to the end (replace <search term>) so that it reads…
- Then, using your RSS reader, subscribe to that URL. If you’re using Google Reader, then simply run your reader
- Click the [Add a subscription] button
- Paste your feed URL into the textbox, and click [Add].
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=<search term>
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=robotics
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A listing of the most recent YouTube videos with robotics in the title or description, generated with Google Reader. (Click the image to enlarge) |
And you’ll be subscribed and receive a list of the latest YouTube videos that include the term, robotics.
In addition to YouTube keyword searches, you can also construct RSS feed URLs for:
- Search in a category,
- Latest videos from a specific channel,
- Feeds for favorite videos,
- Your subscriptions, and
- Playlists
November 16, 2009
A Few Shifts that I See Happening
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This was definitely one of the most interesting places to present — and I’ve presented in some strange places. There was no real sense of the front of the room, which worked well, as I wanted participants to be just that, actively engaged in the conversation. |
If you’ve been missing my blog, well I have too. The last couple of weeks have had me either preparing, traveling, or conducting workshops, keynotes, or presentations — in some of the farthest flung points of North America — at least from the perspective of this small town boy. I won’t go into details except to say that they were most thankful at my bringing North Carolina weather to Edmonton Canada (67F / 19C).
My work was mostly full day sessions with school leaders and leadership teams, and my expressed goal was to help them achieve a mindset necessary to move their schools and school cultures into more effective and relevant use of their growing technology. Typically, I talked about and demonstrated aspects of:
- Contemporary Literacy — Don’t think about how technology has advanced. We might get further by thinking about how information has changed: what it looks like, what we look at to view it, how we find it, where we find it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it.
- Contemporary Literacy & Teaching — What does the new information landscape mean to us in our jobs, and how might we use it to improve and grow in jobs? How do I utilize my own new literacies to create and maintain my own ongoing professional development, to cultivate my own personal learning network?
- Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience • Hacking the ‘Native’ Information Experience — What are the qualities of our students outside-the-classroom information experiences? How do they use information to work, play, converse, and learn? What do those actions look like outside the classroom, and what might they look like inside?
The three mostly separate topics linked together amazingly well. One of the big pushes in Canada seems to be “student engagement.” They want to engage their students in learning, and this vision is coming very much from the Provincial Ministries of Education, at least in the few provinces I’ve worked with lately. But getting that vision to the classroom is an enormous task. It’s like “integrating technology.” What exactly does “student engagement” look like? What do you see when you walk into such a classroom? Does “student engagement” automatically result in better learning?
I find that when I just start writing with no particular aim in mind, it often results in what I think are my strongest blog entries. Doesn’t seem to be happening here. So I’ll close with some shifts that I closed a webinar with last week. They are shifts that come largely from literacy in a new information landscape, maintaining a personal learning network, and paying more attention to our students ‘native’ information experiences.
| Shifts in Education Not that we stop doing one and replace it with the other. This is not a dicomedy |
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| F r o m | T o | |
| • Classroom/Workshop Learning (time/place-based) |
Network Learning | |
| • Institution Dependent Learning | Independent (self-directed) Learning | |
| • Literacy | Learning Literacy | |
| • Lifelong Learning Skills | Learning Lifestyle | |

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November 7, 2009
Can Literacy be Taught?
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Interestingly, each computer has something different on the screen. This is probably fine. Students should be free to use their machines as a thought extensions, utilizing the tools in ways that make sense to them, to help them make sense of what’s being taught.1 |
My week is over, with gigs in Raleigh, Long Island, and three full days around Edmonton, Canada. I take the elevator down in about ten minutes to grab a cab for the Edmonton airport, landing in Raleigh at about 4:40 PM. So I have ten minutes, and its the first ten minutes I’ve had in a week to think about blogging.
So I decided to check for comments on 2¢ Worth that needed moderating, and was surprised to find a number of them. Alas, I haven’t gotten anywhere, because the first one grabbed my attention, a comment from Susi, a teacher in Bangkok. It was a response to my blog post on the difference between Computer Applications and Computer Application (minus the ending “s”), and she implied that to learn a language, such as Japanese, and to become fluent in the language to any degree, it takes more than just teaching it. It has to become a tool for the learning.
Students who become fluent in reading, do so because they read, not because they were taught the basic reading skills. Of course, it wouldn’t have happened without having been taught the basic reading skills. But they become fluent because they are required to read for the rest of their formal education and beyond.
If we expect students to become fluent in the broader and equally critical information and technology skills of being literate in a networked, digital, and abundant (contemporary) information environment, then they should be required to use those skills in all of their formal education, just like reading. Reading, for education, is a learning literacy. Reading, processing, and expressing knowledge in a networked, digital, and abundant information landscape are equally important learning skills — learning literacies.
Our stated goal, right now, in every school and school district, should be for every student to walk into their classrooms with a computer (literacy machine, not a handheld) under their arm. It’s no long a matter of “if” — it’s “when.”
..because literacy skills are meaningless until they become literacy habits.

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- Richbourg, Smyth. “What I Do.” Flickr. 23 Apr 2005. Web. 7 Nov 2009. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsmyther/10599159/>. [↩]
April 13, 2009
21st Century Literacies
My vent about Arne Duncan’s six-day school week kicked up a lot of discussion over the past few days. I can’t remember the last time one of my posts attracted 40 comments. Of course many of them are my replies, but still…
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Unrelated: Here are some photos I took yesterday. I just can’t get enough of these dogwood blossoms. They won’t be around much longer. (click to enlarge) | |
Reading through those comments reminds me a bit of a debate that was held more than 10 years ago at a CoSN conference in Washington, between Judy Salpeter, then editor and chief of Technology and Learning Magazine, and Todd Oppenheimer, who had just written a piece (The Computer Delusion) for The Atlantic Monthly, critical of technology in education. They both made points — and very effectively so. But they were both taking aim at different targets — at different visions of what education should be doing for us today.
It’s what I see here. There is a dramatic difference between what Arne Duncan (and many politicals) probably sees when he envisions appropriate education for today’s children, and what many of us are certain needs to be happening in our students formal education.
I love it when someone smarter than me, says it better than I ever could. In his opening blog post for Online Instigator, Howard Rheingold explains that our children and grandchildren need to…
…grow up knowing how to pluck the answer to any question out of the air, summon their social networks to assist them personally or professionally, organize political movements and markets online? Will they collaborate to solve problems, participate in online discussions as a form of civic engagement, share and teach and learn to their benefit and that of everyone else?
In my vision of the formal education that inspires these skills in our children, the classroom plays only a very small part. These are not just literacy skills. They are learning skills — and they can not merely be taught. To do so only insults and irritates our children. These are skills that must be practiced authentically in order to become habits, not just skills — and the most authentic place to practice them is outside the classroom.
What I’m suggesting is less time in the classroom, not more.
Rheingold continues pressing the point of the importance of these skills when he says that…
The speed, scope, and spread of knowledge might be more critically important at this historic moment than microchips, initial public offerings, business models, 3G networks, Web 2.0 services, or fiberoptic cables.
The nature of information has changed — not in what it does and what it means, but in what it looks like, how it flows and grows, and where and whom it comes from, how we find it, what we use to find it, … It means that there is still much that needs to be taught. The teacher and classroom, though I suggest might take up a smaller part of our students’ day, has actually become far far more important. The library and librarian has become far far more important — if they can re-image themselves to reflect a new information landscape.
Rheingold continues…
And don’t swallow the myth of the digital native. Just because your teens Facebook, IM, and Youtube, don’t assume they know the rhetoric of blogging, collective knowledge gathering techniques of taggers and social bookmarkers, collaborative norms of wiki work, how to tune and feed a Twitter network, the art of multimedia argumentation – and, by far most importantly, online crap detection. (Rheingold)
Our children know how to play the information. They still desperately need us to teach them how to work the information.
I have to smile when I consider that the fellow who shares such insight into our children’s education still wears tie-died shirts — but so be it.
Education researcher, James Paul Gee, writes (article) in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research that…
We live in a high risk world of interacting complex systems. A world subject to dangerous global warming, a now melting high-risk global economy, and massive destruction due to unchecked poverty and population growth. Natural systems are no longer independent of human beings. Urban environments and human energy seeking now affect temperature and storms. Things that were once “acts of God” and are now also “acts of man.”
In my view, in the twenty-first century we need the following—and we need them fast and all at once together: embodied empathy for complex systems; “grit” (passion + persistence); playfulness that leads to innovation; design thinking; collaborations in which groups are smarter than the smartest person in the group; and real understanding that leads to problem solving and not just test passing. These are, to my mind, the true twenty-first century skills. We will not get them in schools alone and we will never get them in the schools we currently have. (Gee)
We need to reinvent education, not just prolong it!
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Gee, James Paul. “Games, Learning, and 21st Century Survival Skills.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2. 1. April 2009 Web.11 Apr 2009.
Rheingold, Howard. “21st Century Literacies.” [Weblog Online Instigator] 10 Apr 2009. SFGate.com. Web.13 Apr 2009. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=38313>.

February 20, 2009
Deeper Info Habits
I’m reading Born Digital, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, both of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. There is not that much in the book that has surprised me, just another source of info on a generation that is different. One part peeked my interest, however, more because of a couple of conversations I have had recently. In the chapter called Learners, they say…
There are a lot of excellent questions to be answered about how kids are learning in the digital envrionment and how that compares to the way they learn in a predominantly analog world. Does reading websites, instead of books and broadsheet-style newspapers, actually change the way peole process information, in the short and long terms? Do kids end up remembering the information that they gather online more or less effectively than they remember matieral from the printed page?
The day before yesterday, when meeting with the administration for a private school I was working with in Atlanta, someone asked about the differences between how students read on the web and how they read in print. I suggested that they look at the work of Donald Leu and his New Literacies Research Team, who are interested in literacy and web-based reading.
When using work-tracking software to record and then analyze children’s operation of the mouse and keys to search for the answer a basic question, the researchers found that there was a great deal of higher order thinking going on. Computer actions indicated that the readers were constantly having to decide on links to follow for alternative texts — and continually re-evaluate their decisions, sometimes deciding to click back.
In the following pages of Born Digital, the authors describe the various reservations that my generation has about our children’s info-habits. Regarding the news, we assume that because digital natives absorb news through the day through various web sites, through their phones, from comedy programs and other unconventional sources, and not reading newspapers and news magazines, then their understanding of current events must be superficial.
We assume that these are biased websites, rather than authoritative organizations like the New York Times or the big television networks. If it’s not outright wrong, then version of the story Digital Natives encounter online must be superficial, many peole fear.
But do we underestimate the depth of our students’ information pursuits and encounters. Paufrey and Gasser say that we do, that we miss the fact that digital natives experience news by interacting with information in constructive ways. They go on to say that natives process information in a three-steps:
- Grazing
- “deep dive”
- feedback loop
They are exposed, according to the authors, to a huge amount of information through the day. It comes in from various favored web sites, news flashes SMS’ed to their phones, other SMSes from their friends, etc. It is a grazing process of picking up tidbits of stories and incorporating them into their word view.
As they encounter something that resonates in some way, they utilize a variety of techniques to dig deeper into the topic, including Wikipedia, Google, news services, and posts on social networks from others who have researched the topic. YouTube may be another source for deeper information as well as powerhouses like CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, The Economist, Global Voices, and Talking Points Memo.
The last phase is not practiced by all digital natives, and, according to the authors, is the part that is the most difficult for traditionalists to grapple with. I’m not sure I agree with this in that I have a long history of writing letters to the editor. But today, these youngsters might write a post to their blog, comment on someone else’s blog or bulletin board. With time and a more creative tilt, they might produce a podcast or post a video’ed plea to YouTube. The difference between my letters to the editor and today’s forms of feedback are their immediacy, and the more real and direct conversation that can result — hence, the feedback loop.
I’m not sure how generally used this three-step process is or even if enough net-gen’ers are engagged in these deeper info habits to generalize in this way. Maybe they have, I just don’t know.
But all of this got me to thinking, back to the original question about reading on the web and reading in print — and I think it’s the period. According to WordNet a Princeton, a period is “a punctuation mark (.) placed at the end of a declarative sentence to indicate a full stop..” It is the end of the sentence. It’s all be said. If you don’t get it, then go back and re-read the sentence.
In a sense, to folks who have been raised on the Net, there are no periods. Certainly there are sentences and hey end in periods. But you can always go further — deeper. You can dig, hyperlink, right-click and dictionary a single word or phrase. Under some cercumstances, you can re-write the sentence, and ask for clarification from the original author.
I just wonder how important this is, how this three-dimensional, ever-expandable, and even alterable reading experience affects our student learners and how they learn. If so, how do we leverage it.
October 27, 2008
TechForum Beyond the Hype Panel: Quesion 1
David Jakes moderated a panel discussion at Technology & Learning’s TechForum in New York. The panelists were myself, Ryan Bretag, and Patrick Higgins. In preparation, Jakes shared with us some questions to mull over. The questions were so good, that I had to write up some of my responses, and will be posting them here over the next few days.
Enjoy!
The first question was, “Are there new literacies that connective technologies create? ..or do these tools afford the attainment of a literacy in a different way?“
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Of course, the answer depends on where you stack that label. If you think of literacy as individual domains of skills, then you’d have to say that we have new literacies. However, I think of literacy simply as the ability to use information to accomplish goals — and in this sense, it not changed. It is the information landscape, within which we practice literacy that has changed, and as a result the skills that constitute literacy have changed — or they have at least expanded. Again, I prefer to think and talk about one literacy. It’s easier to learn, in context, if we consider only one.
I think that talking about multiple literacies, or new literacies, makes it easier for us to manage. It’s easier to teach and then to measure literacy, if we can classify and compartmentalize it. Certainly, many of the skills of literacy must be taught this way. But for students to learn the practice of literacy and the habits of literacy, it has to be transparent and it has to be ubiquitous.
There is one thing that I would do to the term. I’d stop talking about literacy and start emphasizing learning literacy. I learned to read so that I could read a newspaper and follow directions. I would suggest that we create an explicit link between lifelong learning and literacy and perhaps start calling it “Learning Literacy.”
The second part of the question concerns pedagogy. It is my opinion that these new information and communication technologies do not merely afford new methods for learning. They demand it. The old pedagogies are no long relevant.
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October 22, 2008
Three-way Keynote
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I’m finally watching Alice Barr (High School Technology Integrationist), Cheryl Oakes (K-12 Collaborative content coach), and Bob Sprankle’s (Wells School District Integrationis) keynote… “How Can I Become Part of this ReadWriteWeb Revolution?” (video) I was totally impressed with the opening, asking, “They’re teachers! How did they do that?” Then it occured to me. They were using Animoto. Excellent, I’m reminded of the very interesting act of making a commercial for learning.
Then I’m even more impressed with their technique. Basically, the three of them, all Maine’rs and distinguished (shall we say, “famous”) educators, are holding Flips up to each other and videoing each other as they talk. They’re having a conversation, and collecting it, three-way fashion, where, I assume, they edited it together afterward. This is so powerful, and so easy to do. I’m still mystified that in all the tech stores I visited in Hong Kong and Shanghai, I couldn’t find a single Flip.
They talk about the 21st century Literacies, which now include media literacy, communication, Collaboration, innovation, information literacy, digital citizenship, ethics, civics, these are new information literacies. Of course, in a panel discussion I’ll be involved in at Friday’s TechForum in Palasaides, NY, David Jakes, our moderator, will be asking if there are, indeed, new literacies. What do you think?
Alice also talks about creativity (my preference is inventiveness), invoking Thomas Friedman.
“So how do you do that, when you’re stuck in a classroom…?” Bob asks.
Their vision is, “Don’t do it alone!” Find a Cheers! They are actually doing the keynote in an out door cafe.
I like Cheryl’s quest to make the classroom like an ongoing homecoming. On top of some many things that means, it attracts the involvement of the community — because the community has been there. We’ve all been there, in the classroom, and we remember — and we can be inspired to be a part of the “revolution,” as they call it.
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January 26, 2008
Session on Learning in Virtual Worlds
Live Blogged
Literacies for Learning in 3-D Virtual Worlds. This is a session that will focus mostly on Second Life, as the virtual world that most folks know about. Lynn Anderson-Inman, of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education, is talking about the central qualities of virtual worlds. She itemizing and describing…
- immersive,
- interactive,
- participatory,
Driving the demo is Jonathon Richter, also from CATE. I had an intriguing conversation with him before the session, talking about a virtual worlds conference that will be held in Tampa in September.
Lynn also says that one of the important points is that everything is user created, as opposed to other virtual worlds. 3,000 islands. Each island is a server. 9,000,000 distinct users. This room (physical) is packed with folks, some sitting in the floor. I got hear early.
So what are the literacies for this kind of work. Navigating is actually a skill that you have to get good at. There also literacies for interacting with objects. There are literacies for the information, reading, communicating, and sharing information products. Presenting formally at a conference in second life. Gesturing is also a literacy, how to communicate or express your self through your avatar. Then there are the literacies of reading, listening, learning, using exhibits that people have created.
Jonathan is talking about how there are cultures forming in second life where they live in a space and are evolving their own way of communicating. It’s almost like a language that they are forming. It is a language, requiring its own style of literacy.
So, their group us using something called Sloog to tag objects in Second Life, so that they can be identified by subject area and other education topics, and then organized dynamically through a wiki. The items are also being vetted in some way and the best shared through MERLOT. This is worth researching.
There are supposed to be 20 new virtual worlds launched this year. Google is working on one. Sun has an open source server called Darkstar. Second Life has been promising an educational world for about a year.
Thank Goodness for Dubai
TRLD (Technology, Reading, and Learning Diversity) is an incredible conference. It’s small, but it is a community. Many, if not more than half of the attendees of my sessions have been to this conference before, and very few of them are from California. There is a fairly sizable contingent from Canada.
Dr. Donald Leu kicked off the conference with a presentation about web literacy, making a compelling case for expanding our definitions of literacy. One of the most interesting parts of his presentation were findings that often children who test poorly in traditional reading skills on state tests, actually test high in the web literacy assessments that his team are developing.
It’s early the next morning (actually, it’s nearly 9:00 EST). I have one more session this morning, and then I get on a plane and head back to Philadelphia for the last day of Educon. I’ve been lurking a bit on Hitchhikr. I also popped my head in at the spot in Second Life, linked to from the Educon wiki, but no one was there. They have a Ustream page, and some of the cameras are running, this it is mostly the students who will be recording all of the sessions.
I’m preparing for my 11:30 session on RSS, and worrying over subscribing to Flickr feeds. The last time I tried it, a questionable picture showed up, and although it wasn’t such a big deal, there were certainly those in the audience who mentally scratched this extremely valuable resource off of their list. Then it occurred to me this morning, Dubai. List photos tagged with dubai, and there no chance of pornography showing up. Excellent!
Thank goodness for Dubai.
Hmmm! Is there a message here?
November 28, 2007
Taking the Technology Journey at NCETC
I just met the hotel newspaper fairy, while stepping out of the elevator, after going all the way down to the 9th floor to find a working ice machine. He’s short, wears round-rimed glasses, and has combed back black hair that sweeps back into wings above each ear. He seems to wear a uniform, though its more like a bellman’s attire than a policeman — as is the case with the hotel bill fairy, who slips the bill under your door on the last morning of your stay. The newspaper fairy is also a nervous fellow, as I pretty obviously startled him when I walked out of the elevator.
It’s the 20th NCETC, and they threw a wonderful reception last night with lots of food, a chamber orchestra, and lots of people — and the conference staff was obviously excited. I’ve attended every NCETC and I believe that I’ve presented at every one. The earliest state conferences I attended (more than 20 years ago) were run by a regional computer club called Micro 5. It was almost entirely about Apple IIes, and the rage was The Print Shop. There weren’t a lot of people using computers, and we didn’t seem to mind that we were a minority – a very special minority. After all, most schools didn’t have them, and the ones that did, usually had less than a half-dozen.
Today, there are still a lot of teachers who don’t use them and don’t want to. It’s the theme of this conference , so far as the conversations I’m having here. Three times already I’ve told people, I’ve had this conversation three, four, five times already today.
“We can’t even get teachers to fill out a simple web form for our information system. Teachers are telling us ‘We’ve taught well for 25 years without computers, we can do it another five.’ and ‘I do not have time to learn this stuff!’”
It’s true that a teacher can be a great teacher without using technology and it’s true that teachers have a tragic lack of professional time to develop and refine their skills and knowledge. ..And sadly, it is also true that a few teachers are not very good learners.
But I think it’s wrong to expect teachers to use technology. It’s like saying, “I expect you to use the chalk board!” But what if half of the teachers in your school said, “I can be a good teacher without using our textbooks or any other text-based resources. My students are going to learn without reading.” Now that would probably shock us, because deep down, regardless of the testing culture of U.S. schools, we understand that reading is a working skill, not just an academic skill. That students should be using this skill, not just learning it.
I think it’s the same with computers and networks. Using digital networked content is part of being literate, and it is a working skill. Teachers who aren’t using computers and the Internet in their classrooms with their students every day are depriving their children of the opportunity and the right to use basic literacies as working skills. You can be a good teacher an not use technology. But you’re not doing your job.
That said, we need to provide three things to teachers, if we are going to expect them to take the “technology journey.” We need to give them
- A Road – digital networked content no more than an arm’s reach away,
- A Destination – Something on the other side worth working for, and
- No Choice
2¢ Worth





















