While the conversation continues, I want to mention some fun I had last evening.  I took a long walk through downtown Portland (saw Wadsworth-Longfellow’s home).  Along one road, a number of skaters were riding their skateboards down the hill.  I was impressed, and reminiscent of my own experiences.  Of course, back then (way back when) we built the skate boards ourselves.

I had my camera with me and it has a rapid shot feature.  So I took a range of photos of one rider, and then turned them into an animated gif this morning.  Click here or the image to the right to view it.

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Welcome to ccLearn - ccLearn:ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials - legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

I just realized that John included the same quote in his blog, so do click over there to take part in that conversation as well.

My take is that if the Textbook industry does not work really fast to reinvent itself in the image of a more participatory, reader directed, and people connecting information environment, then it’s going to happen without them.

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I twittered about how only two of them were bloggers, no one knew about Web 2.0, only a handful knew what a wiki was, and no one had heard of RSS.  It really forces me to wonder if we’re stirring up a bunch of hype about “Web 2.0″ just to have something to be enthusiastic about.  It’s not a bad thing that these beginning teachers hadn’t heard of Web 2.0.  They’re certainly doing it.  Most of them IM, have MySpace or Facebook (etc.) sites.  They communicate online with individuals and groups, and they’ve used these conversations to teach and learn, though they probably haven’t thought of it that way.

One thing that did strike me was that almost none of them have traditional telephones.  To tell the truth, many don’t even own any furniture.  70% come from outside of Arizona.  But I suspect that with a mobile phone in their pockets, they won’t have much reason to get a land line.

They were very polite, and most of them have no idea what they are in for in the coming months.  But, and this I believe, those who stay will see a renaissance during their career.  The profession that they retire from will have almost nothing in common with that which they are beginning — and teaching will be the most exciting job on the planet.

Back to my question — I think that Web 2.0 is real, we need to be able to label it, and to talk about it, to deconstruct it, lay it out, and apply its parts.  It is changing how we use information, and this affects what and how our children learn.  It’s OK that these beginning teachers can’t do this — as long as doing it, taking part in this conversation, becomes part of teaching.

In describing my blog, she writes…After reading some of the blogs and clicking around on the blog 2 Worth what I have come to realize is that these blogs not only have great information in them but they also have links to other great blogs with great information. (Blog writers) tend to be connected with other (blog writers) so I found myself reading blogs that (they) read - what a wealth of information!!!

Angela has captured so much of what blogging is about.  We blog to learn.  We blog to form and to become a part of online communities, social networks, from which we can learn buy sharing, adding, adapting, and building knowledge that helps us do our jobs in a rapidly changing world.

Great luck to Angela Roy!

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It’s not every day that I get to do a presentation and stay home at the same time.  Scott Merrick contacted me a couple of weeks ago, describing a workshop he was planning for teachers in the Nashville area.  He asked if I would be available to Skype in to the workshop and talk a bit about Web 2.0 and its implications for literacy.  We tested our Skype connection in the morning, with no glitches, and then scheduled my presentation for 2:00 (east coast time). 

Of course, there were some glitches at 2:00, as I was not able to see my audience, via Scott’s camera, but my iSight worked well, and I’m getting better at presenting into a camera.  Use to terrify me — completely befuddle my mind. 

I re-worked one of my presentations, and uploaded it to SlideShare.  I then added a link to the online handouts blog posting for the session, that clicked out a small browser window, sized for the slides, so that each participant was able to follow along with the slides.

I also set up the Twitteresque chat page for the group, and this is what was interesting.  They participated in the chat, posing questions, making comments, saying, “Hi!” more than any group so far — and I wonder why that was.  Was it because I wasn’t there?  Was it that they didn’t feel the need of courtesy to keep eye contact with me?  Was it that they were all sitting with desktop computers in front of them?  Was it that they had command of the slide show?  I am curious!

After the presentation, I transferred the chat transcript over to a wiki for the group, and inserted a few comments of my own, responding to some of their questions.  All-in-all, it was an interesting experience that I am getting more accustomed to.  It isn’t like being there.  Nothing’s like being there.  But virtual presentations are working.  Who would have thought?

The URL is http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/.  The interface is not very intuitive.  There’s a bar above default speech, George Bush’s Jan 2007 State of the Union Address.  You’ll find a scroll tool at the far right of the bar.  Grab it and drag it back to the left to scan through other addresses, going back to “Foundation of Government,” Jan 15, 1776, by John Adams.

It’s kind of interesting to see references and prominence of education.  In the image to the right, Thomas Jefferson evidently made many references to education when he called for a Bill of Rights for the Constitution.

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I checked in at registration around 3:00 and was immediately accosted by six — seemed like more — ed tech mentors asking about conferences that they should attend.  I listed just a few of my favorites and then just got them talking about what they looked for in a conference.  I don’t mean to imply that this was an unpleasant experience.  It’s just that after a day-long vacation with my wife, well I just wasn’t prepared

Then, one young woman asked (and I paraphrase quite poorly), “When you blog all this material, what’s left to teach?  What can you offer in person that’s better?   Again, I was still too addled by the drive up from bangor and an entirely disturbing book (fiction) on my ipod to give an adequate or even coherent answer.  I remember during my early days of blogging, that I was fairly guarded about what I would share, fearful of giving away the services that are, in part, my bread and butter. But that concern drifted away over the months — to where the revenue aspects of what I do no longer filter what I blog about.

Still, I suspect that the question was even deeper than that, and I think that it could raise some interesting discussion.  So what do you think?

“What does blogging replace?” 

“Does it replace anything that was already there?”

I’ll drop Brenda off at the Bangor Airport in the few hours, and then head back over to Castine for another gig — a curriculum conference with Maine teachers.  More about that later…

…

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Published July 15th, 2007

Well… it’s been a while. Seemed to find my fingers freezing on the keyboard as I come anywhere near the blog over the last few weeks. I’ve had lots to say, have been keeping snippets of it in different places but haven’t really gotten around to getting it on paper. Today, however, I’m not going to talk about any of that… but introduce you fine folks to a little dream I had that a couple dozen people helped make a reality. Many of the finer details aren’t really flushed out at this point, so I’ll give yas all a quick description of what we’re going to try and do, and as things develop, I’ll correct the stuff here that’s moved in a different direction. There are various reasons for the vagueness that follows… and I fully expect to write another post to thank the countless people (funders, collaborators, critics and partners) who’ve allowed us to get this underway… but that’ll have to wait until next time.

The Living Archives project.

Between now and the 31st of march 2008 we’re going to be taking some (probably 7th graders) students to the local heritage sites (museums and archives) getting them to digitize some ‘old stuff’ contextualized by some period literature and records, put that stuff into a digital archive, write some interesting things about those digital artifacts to be published in a new interactive e-book we’ll be building out of drupal, and then go into Second Life and build a replica of 19th century Prince Edward Island.

Simple right. All we have to do is meld in with the existing curriculum in three different school districts (two English and one French) build an entire educational program (for the tech literacies) which we will then print to DVD and give out to schools on the Island, adapt out existing digital library work to work with kids, take the existing drupaled distribution of drupal and convince it to do what we want it to do, and build a historical Island in SL that will house the digitized artifacts in period houses… giving people a chance to ‘experience’ life at the start of the 20th century here on the red dirt island on the east coast of Canada.

Why exactly did I want to do this?

Like so many things it started with a simple conversation and then spiraled horribly out of control. Wonderfully, crazily out of control. I’ve been wanting a ‘holistic’ project for a long time now. A project where we tried to take a given bit of learning or knowledge or something and followed it through a whole cycle. In this case, lets say we follow a photo of Gertrude peeling a potato. Give me lots of latitude here… the project is still morphing… this should only be meant to give you a basic idea

1. student wants to talk about potatoes (potatoes are very important on PEI see second paragraph…)2. goes to archive, finds picture of Gertrude peeling potato3. scans said photo4. finds newspaper from 1905 with price of potatoes5. goes to museum, finds potato cool knife, puts it in 3D scanner (yes… we bought one)6. writes story about working in potato field in summer, compares lifestyles to previous times7. story goes into online eportfolio, to be commented on by other students and ‘leaders’8. story, photo, knife, newspaper go into e-book (still don’t like this word… need something else) and get tagged and linked to other things that are similar9. all digitized stuff also goes automatically into digital archive with nice metadata stripped from context and file10. photo shows up on shelf over fireplace in SL (story shows up when photo is clicked) knife ends up on table and newspaper article (found on table) links to the photo

bit of a rambling example. but this is (kinda) where we’re hoping to get. We still have many different ideas going around and are slowly building our team… but the project is confirmed and we’re going to take our best shot at it. We have a gigantic meeting on the 24th of July, after which I’ll feel alot more comfortable speaking in more specifics.

Enter MindMeister which has my mind a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that so far, after about an hour’s worth of playing, is really letting me do great stuff. You can check out the intro video on the site, but here are the key features I’ve found so far that I’m liking a lot:

1. Easy importing of my FreeMind Maps. You can do it with MindJet MindManager too. Nice.
2. Drag and drop and easy keyboard tools. I love Ajax. (This is Ajax, right?)
3. Sharing/collaboration. Just invite people in to play.
4. In the best wiki tradition, it has a history so you can track changes. (Awesome.)
5. You can publish your Maps to the Web, even embed them into a blog post.
6. And while they don’t have an RSS feed to track changes, they do let you configure update alerts to your…wait for it…Twitter account.

They even have this cool little extension for MAC users that puts a little app on your desktop that you can post ideas or links to your default map in a flash. Mercy.

This has been a great couple of weeks for tools…Skitch, Jing, and now this. And the thing I love about all of them is that they are solving that little publishing hump in a very easy way by making the upload piece a seamless part of the process.

Prediction: Google buys MindMeister within six months…