innovation3

This is my first post on my new Edublog site. (I transferred my blogspot posts and comments to this site.) I thought it would be a fitting platform for announcing important news to all those who signed up as collaborators on the Learning Beyond Boundaries (LBB) Wiki. I hope to make a public announcement of this news at the Building Learning Communities Conference (BLC08) next week.

Part I – Come Collaborate with LBB Collaborators and ASCD Annual Conference Staff

The time has come to start developing the LBB collaboration with ASCD. I hope you will become an active participant in our effort.

Little did we know when we started the Learning Beyond Boundaries wiki that the vision several of us had at the time might have a chance of fruition. What would happen if we approached those responsible for ASCD’s Annual Convention and asked them to partner with interested educators in a discussion on how best to infuse learning about the read/write web 2.0 culture into the annual conference? The hope was that the ASCD staff would allow us a channel to bring the read/write web 2.0 culture to a broader audience of teachers and administrators. We wanted to break out of the echo chamber and come up with a strategy to help, not a few but, thousands of educators learn how the Internet can now be used as a tool to engage students and educators in powerful, substantive, self-directed learning.

The deadline we set for ourselves was May 5, 2008, the due date for ASCD’s 2009 Annual Conference presentation proposals. One hundred people signed up on the LBB Wiki endorsing the proposal we crafted to submit to ASCD’s Planning Committee. Here is the opening of that proposal, framed as an open letter to ASCD.

May 4, 2008
8:30 P.M. EDT

I am Dennis Richards, Massachusetts ASCD Affiliate President and ASCD Leadership Council member.

I represent a group of educators who have the expertise available through our extensive online Web 2.0 network of educator presenters to assist ASCD to fill a technology-rich strand at the 2009 Annual Conference.

Today we not only consume information from the Internet, we are contributors of information. All Internet participants have the potential to become teachers and producers of content as learning becomes personal, authentic, and highly individualized. Social software includes wikis, blogs, podcasts, instant messaging, and any system that allows communication that also emphasizes the richness of personal interaction instead of the technologies that make the interactions possible. The generations we teach now and will teach in the future innately use technology to communicate. The need for learning experiences to adapt to meet a new generation of learners is upon us.

Here is the full proposal; here is the current list of LBB collaborators. I have opened the wiki for now so other educators can join us. I expect to close it again on July 20, 2008. If you know people who may want to join us, please tell them to sign up on the collaborators’ page by that date.

Kathleen Burke, Director, ASCD Annual Conference, was very interested and accepted our offer as soon as I spoke to her the first week in May. At the time she said she hoped we would be willing to work on a three-year plan to educate ASCD’s membership to the read/write web 2.0 culture through the Annual Conference. I was extremely pleased, but I thought the 2009 conference would be year one. I expected Kathleen to get back to me soon so we could start planning. Then little communication until Thursday, July 11, 2008. Kathleen and her staff had been busy working on the details of the 2009 conference. In the meantime, some of us received notices that our workshop proposals were accepted. But what about our collaboration proposal that seemed stuck in limbo.

Well, yesterday Kathleen and I spoke, and now it is time to begin our work. More details are coming in the next few weeks, and Kathleen and I are open to any suggestions for content and process to further our goal of integrating technology seamlessly into learning for all students and educators.

Here is what Kathleen and I discussed over the cell phone yesterday as I traveled to Cape Cod in my car from Boston, Massachusetts. The wonders of technology… (No, I did not take notes while driving. Kathleen was kind enough to email me what we discussed.)

Pre Annual Conference – Fall of 2008

• ASCD would like to conduct one or more interactive online session(s) (using Elluminate or some other similar online conferencing tool) with you and your team members to discuss and develop the components of a three-year technology plan for the ASCD Annual Conference in order to promote the integration of technology into the curriculum/school day and to support educators’ use of technology in learning.

At Annual Conference – March 2009

• ASCD invites LBB collaborators to audit the technology sessions at the 2009 ASCD Annual Conference and provide feedback on the sessions as well as suggestions for future topics to be presented at Annual Conference over the next three years.

• ASCD invites LBB collaborators to participate in a technology interest work session at the Annual Conference (I’ll ask Kathleen to arrange for you to attend this session virtually, if you can not be at the conference.) to provide input on how ASCD can promote/support the integration of technology into the curriculum/school day and to support educators’ use of technology in learning.

• ASCD invites LBB collaborators to review the draft of a 3 year plan for technology for the ASCD Annual Conference.

This does not preclude LBB collaborators from working together this summer and throughout the year to prepare for more direct work with Kathleen and her staff. Let’s collaborate, contribute, and create through our LBB association in a way that will impress ASCD with our insight and experience, invent a whole new way of delivering our message to a broad audience of educators, and significantly transform the vision students and teachers have of learning spaces.

Leave your thoughts by commenting on this post.

Part II – October 1, 2008 Deadline for Educational Leadership – Literacy 2.0

On a related note, ASCD’s premier publication, Educational Leadership (EL), will publish a March 2009 Annual Conference edition in March on Literacy 2.0. Here is what they have online for the issue.

March 2009

Literacy 2.0

Students are more plugged into technology than they have ever been before–through smartphones, iPods, laptops, social networks, and electronic games. This issue will explore the role of literacy in our ever-evolving digital environment. How can we help students learn and transfer traditional literacy skills? What new literacy skills are called for—and how can students guide teachers in acquiring these key skills? How can we teach students to judge the reliability, accuracy, and quality of information? Articles will explore how wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, and portals of streaming media have affected how students read, write, speak, think, and work.

Deadline: October 1, 2008

I will be speaking with the editor about how we can help ASCD prepare for this issue, but here are some of my thoughts. You can collaborate by

• getting the word out to people you know who should write an artcle for this issue,
• suggesting questions that the articles should try to answer so that the March 2009 EL is a best practices examination of the field, and
• suggesting article topics and/or people whom we should encourage to write for the EL issue.

Leave your thoughts by commenting on this post.

I think this is an interesting development in the world of networked learning. Although I don’t like the corporate slant to the applications of research, perhaps we could have some influence on directing part of the energy of the center to education.

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’

The Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing they way people work together.

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Launch Video (Requires RealPlayer 8.0+)

PART 3
December 8, 2007

One of the things I saw over the last few years in the Roman Catholic church I attended when I was young is how many gray heads were sitting in the pews during mass on Sunday. What was going on? How will the church have to change to enlist youth in religion?

I have been speaking over the last few month about the digital shift occurring in our youth. We see that in the electronic devices they use and have access to each day. How will schools have to change to keep up with this shift to enlist youth in education?

An then again… what are the implications of Weinberger’s observations and theories?

Last night I collected my computer and Logitech laptop camera to attend the David Weinberger dinner and lecture I mentioned in my December 5th blog post. When I arrived at the dinner which I had assumed was going to be a small, intimate dinner with the author and some friends, I was surprised to see over a hundred people in their 60’s and 70’s feasting on a buffet dinner. I learned that the dinner was part of a Friday Forum lecture series.

I was out of place, not because of my age, but because of my computer. Once again (this happens everywhere) I was the only one with a black leather computer case. The digital shift is not ubiquitous yet.

It was a pleasant meal with some friendly people, but I wanted to engage with the author about his thinking and this wasn’t going to be the forum for that kind of an exchange. The organizer for the event did introduce me to Weinberger. I told him I was looking forward to his presentation; “you have put words to what I have been thinking,” I said to him. Weinberger replied, “Good thing your thoughts aren’t copyrighted.”

I was the first to leave dinner; I wanted to get to the lecture hall so I could test out the internet connection and prepare for my Ustream.tv broadcast. Although I still hadn’t figured out how to archive a broadcast, I still wanted to try; sooner or later I will find out and the experience with broadcasting will get me ready for my EduCon 2.0 presentation on January 26, 2007, Claiming what we Imagine.

I fired up Firefox only to get the “no connection screen.” I fittled with with “View available Networks” and found that they was a wireless connection in the air, but when I tried to connect, I got a message asking me for an ID, password, and room number. Frustrating, but it happens everywhere, either there is no connection or their is a connection for only the registered users. Obviously, with no connection, no Ustream broadcast.

People from the dinner and many others (totaling I’d guess 250) shuffled into the lecture hall. Most were in their 60’s and 70’s ~ no one had a computer but me. David Weinberger was introduced with words of praise that must have come from the reviews of his new book. He began his presentation and wow! It was almost exactly the same presentation he gave on Google. See PART 2, December 6th below. How ironic! Here is a Fellow from Harvard’s prestigious Berkman Institute for Internet & Society speaking about how accessible knowledge on the internet is for users and I’m sitting in a presentation for the second time! I found out later on his blog that the presentation is his “stump speech” for his new book.

Did he assume no one would Google his name and find the presentation video and watch it before the Friday Night lecture? Did it not occur to him to even make the connection between his online version, the presentation I was watching and an internet literate audience?

I am grateful to have access to his ideas online and it doesn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm for him as a speaker with the “digital immigrant” generations. Will we realize that a monster is growing among us?

• Digital natives are the result of our world’s cultural and economic inclinations.
• Inertia is preventing us from changing to digital habits (ubiquitous internet access?).
• Digital natives are not showing up to analog institutions: churches, education, Friday Night lectures.