2¢ Worth

First of all, I am thrilled that 2? Worth is back in living color, after having been attacked at the beginning of NECC and, consequently, quarantined by Google.  I fixed the problem, with the help of tech folks at Rackspace (who hosts my servers) and Google did another sweep, pronouncing my blog cured!

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I’d fully intended to post a NECC reflection piece today, but almost without intent, found myself reading a thoughtful and considerate entry (America …. You’ve Got Trouble) from Clarence Fisher sharing his concerns for American schools.  His ideas, seemed to run through a lot of the oral conversations I was a part of among attendees from outside the U.S.  He says,

I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of the most innovative, inventive people involved with your education system America. They are kind, bright, and open people. willing to share and willing to think in new ways; you should be very proud of them. But I don’t think you’re getting it. … But I don’t hear many people talking about classrooms, or about how these concerns and worries about a changing world look like in practice. Many of your educational thought leaders are frustrated by a system that doesn’t seem to honour them and their creativity. They are hampered by the complete dominance of artificial testing and by corporations who are controlling the debates that surround change. Many of them have unfortunately been driven out of your classrooms, right where you need them the most.

One commenter said, in explanation of a Twitter post she’d made during the conference, “I wonder if Canadian schools really get it.”  And I’d have to agree that I’ve met teachers in Canada who are stuburnly holding to the methods of the past.  But I’ve worked in Canada, and the U.K., and New Zealand, and Scotland, and what I see there are national efforts to retool education by treating their students as customers — and in some cases these are the terms they are using.

These are not efforts, however, to please the students.  It’s a growing believe that to prepare our children for their future, we have to understand them and to teach from their perspective, through their lenses, as they look to their future.  I’ve written before about the incridible things I’ve seen in each of these countries, practices that would be labeled as “risk-taking” and even “counter-productive” in mine.

I think fondly of the early days of educational technology — when we were finding uses for the earliest personal computers, TRS-80s, Apple IIs, Ataris, and the amazingly powerful Amigas.  We were still working under the radars of our bosses, and we were inventing new ways for our students to see their world, not through an Internet, but through the experiences of working information and ideas in empowering and seductive ways.

The problem, in my opinion, began when we started to consider and to treat our students as our future workforce.  When it became our industries that were at stake, rather than democracy, then we had no choice but to mechanize education, to turn it into an assembly line, where we install math, and install reading, and install science, and then measure each product at the end to make sure that they all meet the standards — that they all know the same things and think the same ways.

The sad part is that this theme of class as future work force is just about too firmly entrenched to turn around in the short months and years we have, before it’s too late.  I’m finding myself promoting the creative arts skills for the sake of the economy, rather than a richer life for our children.  But even within that story, I think that we can retool our classrooms in a way that does help our children inside and outside their work experiences.

I agree with Clarence.  We are spending our time and energies hammering at the walls, rather than reinventing what’s happening in our classrooms.  It’s my one complaint about EduBloggerCon and it’s something I’ve thought about during and immediately after NECC.  I’m continuing to think about what I’m going to do about it.

Thanks Clarence and to all of the educators who came to the U.S. and graciously shared with us at NECC — a true festival of learning.

Oh! and I’m so sorry, Clarence, we didn’t get a chance to sit and talk.  I’d love to have discussed Herman Hesse with you!

Here are my ongoing notes for Day three at NECC 2008:

..Then you haven’t been to the exhibit hall.  I took time to walk down about three quarters of a single row yesterday in the NECC Exhibit hall, and saw no fewer than five new social network or community products — “This social network is going to revolutionize physical education!”  I actually found myself standing and listening to the eloquently delivered pitch for the latest in routers, just for the rest. 

Now don’t get me wrong.  Social networks are great.  I think we need them as much as our kids do, and for a lot of the same reasons.  But I still don’t think we get it.  I don’t think we need new rooms to close ourselves into.  We’re trying to get ourselves and the others teachers we work with out of our rooms — out so that we can see at a distance.  I can’t help but believe that if students saw this, they’d be laughing so hard, well you get the picture. [Image from Stephen Clark¹]

I mentioned something at the EduBloggerCon that I really want to put more thought into and maybe even writing some a little more substancial than a blog.  I can’t help but believe that the real power of the social network is not the container.  The real power is in the individual, through his or her profile.

1. Clark, Stephen. "Kids Laughing At Bread Line Sculpture." Sgclark's Photostream. 22 Dec 2007. 2 Jul 2008 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgclark/2129494643/>. [↩]

Here is another attempt to live blog the few sessions I am able to attend using CoverItLive. Wish me luck. I have a strong signal right now!

I had a conversation yesterday with a fellow (? Hoffman) in the Open Source Playground, a representative of the Indiana Department of Education.  Indiana is well into a 1:1 program (Indiana’s Open Source Experiment), where they are using Open Source solutions to more affordably (and perhaps more authentically) put digital networked content in the hands of their students.

We were talking about some of the affects of ubiquitous access to computers and the Internet, and he mentioned in one of his anecdotes, that students were “using their teachers.”  It wasn’t intended as one of those “bang” statements.  It was just a turn of phrase that came out.  But it stuck me pretty dramatically as a contradiction of our usual sense of teaching being something that teachers do to their students.  Here, the implication is that students, rather than being taught to, were using teachers, presumably as a resource to accomplish something.

Not sure if that was actually the case, but the turn of phrase came from somewhere.

Yesterday morning, I collected a bunch of photos tagged with NECC08, mostly pictures from the Blogger’s Cafe, and then pumped them into Animoto for a video to start my Spotlight session with yesterday.  This morning, I uploaded the video to YouTube.  If you want to watch, click the picture to the right.

Photos were taken by Verne Becker, AC Thompson, Scott McLeod, LJ Moore, Scott S. Floyd, Ddraig-Goch, applem123, Dean Shareski, Fan of Biber, Joyce Valenza, Nedra,  Lucy Gray, Mark Pennington, Derrall Garrison, Ewan McIntosh, David Warlick.

I’m planning to use this blog entry to record notes, using ConverItLive.

Many thanks to Kevin Jarrett for hearing about the problems with my blog and contacting his insider friends at Google to try to learn why they’ve blacklisted 2? Worth.  Also, many thanks to Matthew Tabor for his help.  Matthew had the same problem and through more resourceful research than I had yet accomplished, found (or laid) a path to clearing these things up.  I’ve followed that path, after conducting a complete reinstall of my blog.

So, 2? Worth should be cleared for Firefox 3.0 users in the next five days, or if they aren’t too busy, maybe just a few hours.  Thanks again for access to some very smart people — through the wisdom of the crowd.

I’m sitting in the keynote event now, paying attention to the happenings around me, and trying to rescue my blog at the same time.  After I enjoy James Surowiecki, I’ll head back up to my room to continue working on the blog.  Great intro video play with and nice music.  I can’t leave it alone, with 2? wimpering.  So I’ll be rudely typing while watching and listening.  So sorry for the folks sitting around me.

Here’s the problem.  At some point, for some reason, Google detected malware on a blog page, and stored that little tid bit of info way.  This shouldn’t be a problem since it’s not found anything in the last several weeks.  However, Firefox 3.0 has a new Malware security feature that, when you load a page, checkes Google to see any malware has been detected in the past 90 days.  If it finds one, then it fashes the warning you see on the right.

Since there doesn’t seem to be a way to remove this reference from Google until the 90 days are up, I am trying to move 2? Worth to a new location, http://davidwarlick.com/2-cents/.  For folks who are having no problems at all — users of browsers other than Firefox 3.0 — I’m going to add a redirect.  So there shouldn’t be any disruption — I hope.  This shouldn’t disrupt RSS feeds at all.

Anyway, getting back to the work.

Thanks for your patience.

EduBloggerCon is over and NECC is all around us.  Yesterday’s amazing talk-fest was a huge success, by my reckoning — and to no small degree, thanks to the work and skill of Steve Hargadon.  To me, I had a sesne, from the very beginning, there this day was going to be valuable.  Going into a talk-fest, an unconference — it can be a daunting thing.  There is no reason to know what to expect or if it’s going to work.  It depends on the group, and an atmosphere of respect for a community of people.  To me, it was immediately obvious that this was going to work, we could depend on this day for enlightenment, even if hard answers would remain elusive. [Image from Ewan McIntosh¹]

I thank Steve, out loud, for giving us this, through his leadership.

There was some discussion at the end of the day about the growth of EduBloggerCon.  I’m not sure how many people actually attended, but more than 200 were expected — significantly more than last year.  Can an EduBloggerCon continue to function if the numbers continue to increase.  I would think that it can, as long as it adapts.  Among the suggestions were smaller rooms, less heavy machinery in the vicinity (you had to be there), more sessions running simultaneously, assurance that sessions will be unconference in nature, and more recording of the sessions.

One thing that I noticed was that a few conversations seemed to emerge in almost every session that I participated in.  Among them were attitudes of teachers, attitudes of administrators, ubiquity of the technology, and a few others.  There was a wide range of sessions suggested, but I wonder — and I’m just wondering — if there might be a way of focusing in on these fundamental issues, within the schedule and layout.

A problem that keeps nagging at me is that I didn’t come away with any hard answers.  It’s probably because there aren’t any answers yet, and hard answers may not even be the point of an EduBloggerCon.  But, I wonder if we might start next year’s event with a set of questions, and then ask attendees, after EduBloggerCon 2009, to collaborate in answering those questions from what they’ve learned from the conversations.

Finally, there was a long conversation at the end, about the appropriateness of Pearson’s recording a large part of the event.  Personally, it didn’t bother me.  We’re all making a living.  But I had an interesting conversation on my way back to the hotel with John Costella (or was it Bob Carlton?), of WeAreTeachers, who has attended BloggerCons and BarCamps in the San Francisco area.  He said that the ideas of commercialization was a staple conversation among these gatherings.  We concluded that the attitudes and free-spirit thinking that makes a BloggerCon work, will predictably lead to conversations about the place of commerce.

1. McIntosh, Ewan. "Geek Sesh." Edublogger's Photostream. 28 June 2008. 30 Jun 2008 . [↩]