Think about *all* the implications that come from shifting our language from learn(ing) from to learn(ing) with. (and words matter, right David Jakes?)

That’s the “shift” that has to happen. (apologies to Karl Fisch)  That’s it.

“Learning from” was often necessary when one party in the learning transaction(s) had greater access to information than the others. There are hardly any differences in access to information anymore.

“Learning with” has always been possible, but it was limited by our capacity to be in the same place(s) at the same time(s). Those limitations are all but gone now, too.

I don’t want to learn from anyone anymore, and I don’t want students to learn from me anymore. I’m willing to be a lead learner, but I want to learn with everyone.

No point in re-creating the wheel, so I’ve copied the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues below (he only difference is that I embedded my teaser video into this post instead of just providing a link):

***

Dearest colleagues,
If I told you that there is an extraordinary educational conference that you can attend at no expense to your travel budget, (or to any other budget, for that matter) and that you could attend largely at your own convenience, you’d listen, right?

Well, beginning on October 13 and continuing through the end of the month, the K12 Online Conference 2008 will be taking place…well…everywhere and anywhere.  As it is written on the homepage of the conference:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

To learn more about the conference, I would suggest reading and clicking through this site. Basically, though, presentations are made via prerecorded videos and broadcast at specific times.  There are also opportunities to “meet” and “talk to” the presenters at a webinar called a Fireside Chat.

The schedule of events can be found here.  You will notice that yours truly is one of the select presenters and my presentation airs on Tuesday, October 21 at 12:00 p.m GMT (which, if I’m correct, is 8:00 EST). You can view a “teaser” of my presentation [below], and teasers for many of the other presentations are being added to the conference blog every day.

I can’t recommend this conference enough, and please pass along this information to your students.  This is a FREE conference FOR educators BY educators.  It is a 21st Century conference about 21st Century teaching and learning.

Thanks for considering this extraordinary learning opportunity and I hope to “see” you at the fireside chats!

Yours,
JB

For months now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to develop an online community to enhance our programs within the Department of Educational Leadership at VCU.  Currently, each course has its own Blackboard space.  We also send lots of e-mails to students, though sadly we don’t even have good e-mail groups in our e-mail client (that’s pathetic, I know).  So, communication across courses, across programs, and across the years is impossible.  It’s a sad state of affairs, and I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out the best way to establish an online community for all of our students, faculty and even alumni.

I suppose my biggest problem is that I’m looking for the perfect one-stop solution.  I’m very familiar with Ning and I’ve been playing around with various wiki systems that work nicely as places for collaboration and communication.  Those are fine ways to create a single online community.  One problem for me, though, is that our department consists of many different groups, cohorts, etc. Here’s a graphical representation of our department:

I want each group, cohort, etc. to be able to communicate privately with each other, but to also be a part of the larger community.  So, I could, for example, setup a department-wide Ning and then setup each cohort as a group.  However, the groups within Ning don’t have the full functionality of Ning (e.g. they can’t setup their own document repository or a separate page for anything, really).  And, the groups are not private.

A second problem is that I want to be able keep track of activity with an RSS feed.  But, as you may know, private spaces (Ning, Wetpaint, etc.) don’t allow for RSS feeds.  This limitation also stops me from setting up a Ning or Wetpaint for each group, cohort, etc. and then setting up a department-level aggregate page via NetVibes or Pageflakes (a la Steve Hargadon’s approach here).

So, where am I?  Right now, I’m leaning towards a department-level Ning as the hub of our online community.  From there, I could setup groups for each cohort, group, etc. with a link to a private wiki for each cohort, group, etc. (leaning heavily towards WetPaint for that).  In the absence of RSS feeds, I’ll have to subscribe to each site via e-mail and then setup routing rules so that my inbox doesn’t get flooded.  It’s also going to be a naming nightmare.  But, that’s my best current solution.

If any of you smart people have better ideas, I’d be more than happy to hear them.  Thanks in advance!

In response to Scott McLeod’s 140-character book review contest, I submitted an entry that summarized/synthesized two books in less than 140 characters.  I wrote:

ORGANIZING (EVERYBODY AND/OR EVERYTHING) IS DIFFERENT NOW.

That’s it.  Put together “Here Comes Everybody” and “Everything is Miscellaneous” and that’s what you get.

For those who read the books, those 57 characters should make perfect sense.

For those who’ve read either or neither, it should be fairly self-explanatory.  But, if not, basically, HCE is about how Web 2.0 lowers (and in many cases, eliminates) the transaction costs of organizing a group of like-minded individuals to achieve a common goal.  EIM is about how the digitizing and tagging of information means that old organizing schemes developed for physical information (e.g. the Dewey Decimal system) have given way to digitzing+tagging+aggregating.

That’s it.  Class over.  Thanks for coming and you can now go read something that actually requires book-length treatment.

Lots of folks are reflecting on their NECC experiences.  The reactions vary.  Scott’s bullish, while Sheryl is not so sure.  Also, towards the end of the conference, there were LOTS of tweets about brains hurting and brains shutting down.  Ewan, using the work of Chris Craft, even wrote about this seeming cognitive overload.

My guess is that we’re all struggling with living and learning in an attention economy in the digital world.  As I’ve written before, I don’t know a whole lot about “Attention Economics,” but according to Wikipedia, Herbert Simon wrote that:

…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it (Simon 1971, p. 40-41)

Let me repeat that one part: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information…

Simon wrote that in 1971; a very different time.  So, further down on the Wikipedia site, it says:

According to digital culture expert Kevin Kelly, the modern attention economy is increasingly one where the consumer product costs nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles that can not be reproduced at no cost. He identifies these intangibles as:^[1]

1. Immediacy – priority access, immediate delivery
2. Personalization – tailored just for you
3. Interpretation – support and guidance
4. Authenticity – how can you be sure it is the real thing?
5. Accessibility – wherever, whenever
6. Embodiment – books, live music
7. Patronage – “paying simply because it feels good”, e.g. Radiohead
8. Findability – “When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.”

Undoubtedly, much of the information was immediate, accessible, and findable.  Ustream, CoverItLive, etc.;I mean the backchannels seemed to begin before the conversations/presentations started.  Thus, there was value from that standpoint.

For me, though, the personalization aspect was missing.  I’ve written about how little focus there was on educational leadership and the nearly complete absence of dialogue on issues of equity and social justice.  Thus, ISTE, as a supplier of a product, did not provide those intangibles for me through NECC.  This detracted from the total value of NECC for me.

Also, I think the spector of consumerism made it all less authentic than it needed to be.  At our hotel, each day, some vendor dropped off at our rooms a copy of something called “The Ed Tech Show Daily.”  It was not much more than a glossy accumulation of very large advertisements.  Each ad promoted the “program” or “product” that’s the “best.”  “Company X is the nation’s leading XXXX…”  “Product Z is the #1…in schools…”  I can’t even begin to comment on the exhibit hall.  As Kelly writes, with language like that, how can we be sure it’s the real thing?  With so much promotion going on, authenticity is hard to find.

Finally, I think we’re all having to do our own interpretation of the product that is NECC.  ISTE did not really provide that intangible along with its product.

For me, then, I’m interpreting NECC as a product that ISTE offers along with the intangibles of immediacy, accessiblity and findability.  But, the information was so immediate and accessible that I, for one, did not allocate my attention efficiently.  Furthermore, now we’re all having to personalize and interpret it for ourselves (what does ALL this MEAN for ME?).

I’m wondering now, given all of the critiques of Edubloggercon, if we might consider holding something of that sort (something more unconference-y) AFTER NECC as a space for reflection, interpretation and meaning-making.  I suppose many of us are doing that through our blogs, but I crave some unplugged f-2-f time with edubloggers in particular about all that went down at NECC.  What about you?

Just sat through most of the “discussion” on filtering policies.  Good/interesting discussion.  My take:

• “Policies” vary across districts.  Some have very stringent AUPs that go well beyond CIPA (for example).  One participant spoke about a “mature” AUP that trusts kids and teachers to do the right thing.  They treat “bad” sites like bad books or posters.  Those are individual situations to be dealt with when they happen.
• Lots of frustration.  Many LEPs block social networking sites because they are “open.”  From a leadership standpoint, that’s an understandable approach even if it’s not the most pedagogically sound.
• Conversations need to happen between leaders, teachers, community, etc.  I believe everyone can get along as long as the dialogue is ongoing and educators are treated like professionals.  There ARE ways to keep kids away from “bad” stuff and to also allow teachers to work with the kids to get where they need to go.

Good start to NECC and EBC.

photo credit: Nathan Y

Recently, on Darren Draper’s blog, I commented on the sort of “invention sessions” that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about and that Darren suggested would be an interesting addition to the field of education (I agree completely, BTW).  I wrote: “I wonder if electronic communities are sufficient. Classroom 2.0 is a wonderful resource, but do ‘invention sessions’ necessarily require prolonged f-2-f interactions among a small group of smart people? I think this is an empirical question.”

In response to my comment, Darren wrote, “Strange, but you’re right about the f2f interactions. There is something about having a face to face relationship with someone – and the power that comes from bringing it to online settings. It’s as if one without the other isn’t quite as effective. I know that as I’ve met people f2f, our interactions online become more rich…That said, I think many would argue that f2f interactions aren’t required for effective ‘invention sessions’. This topic needs to be addressed further.”

I henceforth address the topic further, and I respectfully disagree (though maybe it’s just a matter of how we interpret Gladwell’s writing about invention sessions). Please don’t get me wrong…I think there are incredible opportunities and ideas to be pursued through the use of networking sites such as Ning, and the learning opportunities afforded by the combination of networking tools such as Ning, Twitter, UStream, Elluminate, etc. are endless.

However, I think what we are doing by collectively using those applications is creating individualized yet overlapping learning communities.  And, with NECC 2008 approaching, I will meet (with) many of those within my learning community and add face-to-face communication to that community.  I believe this is ideal for two reasons.  First, my own learning is aided because growing evidence suggests that e-learning is best when supplemented with f-2-f interactions (i.e. “blended” learning).  Second, as I’ve written about before, based on the work of Etzioni and Etzioni (THE experts on “community”), the ideal form of community is a hybrid one. Communities that utilize hybrid systems “would be able to bond better
and share values more effectively than communities that rely upon only one or the other mode of communication” (Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999, p. 247).  Thus, adding Web 2.0 tools to traditional learning spaces such as presentations, conferences, etc. creates perfect personal learning communities; the learning is better and the community is better.  PLN/PLE + F-2-F = PLC [NOTE: I believe the PERSONAL learning community is distinguishable from the PROFESSIONAL learning community made famous and popularized by Rick DuFour and others.  But, that's the subject of another blog post...].

However, I understood the “invention session” to be an action/change-oriented, synchronous interaction between a small group of really smart individuals with very different personal and/or professional perspectives.  I suspect that those in the sessions of which Gladwell wrote extended their discussions with computer-mediated communications (CMC), but I think the initial brainstorming needed to be done together, in the same room at the same time for an extended period of time.  I’m as much an advocate of CMC as anyone, but things happen f-2-f that cannot be replicated digitally.  I also think the action orientation of invention sessions necessitates limiting the number of participants.  If you’ve ever chaired a committee or a task force, you can probably appreciate such a limitation.

If someone can offer an example of a major “invention” or “innovation” that was developed purely through CMC among a large group of individuals, I’d be willing to reconsider my argument.  Until then, I throw out two questions:

1. What do you think?  Can an invention session be held solely online?
2. If there were to be an invention session to. let’s say, eliminate the achievement gap, which 5-7 living individuals would you want to be involved?

There’s an interesting story (free registration required) in the New York Times about professors who blog and engage in other forms of Web 2.0-ness.  I think the MtvU exec. makes the best point when he says that it’s about transparency.  I’ve also espoused transparency as an orientation to my own work, and I think blogging is a natural extention of that for me. 

What I think the NYT article misses though is any discussion about teaching or learning.  Specifically, the edublogosphere has become my personal learning space and those who feed me (in RSS terms) and who I follow on Twitter are my personal learning network.  I blog because I believe (maybe mistakenly?) that I have something to offer this learning space and because I believe I am somewhat obligated to give and not just take.  Also, by making my thoughts and ideas “public,” I’m inviting others to join my PLN. 

If I can get past the tenure hurdle, I’d love to embark on an empirical journey around this notion of collaborative/digital learning.  I’d like to know how PLN’s jive with theories of learning, community, etc.  I’d like to know how we can foster PLNs in doctoral education.  I’d like to know how we can use PLNs to advance school leadership.  So, I guess that’s why I blog, tweet, comment, etc.  I’m learning about learning.