Today just a link to a podcast by Alan November and Will Richardson on the Read-write web and the amazing tools and opportunities for classrooms. These two experts give a good overview of just what is happening in the new world here is the link listen also I suggest you check out Mr. Richardson’s new book available at Amazon, Blogs,Wiki’s, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools. I am in the process of buying it for everyone I know.
Lots of things are going on for me in my head since the November Learning Conference, teaching, ethics and information, and the state of affairs in the system in which we live (the system I live in as an educator is NYC DOE). I am awake to the fact that we have responsibility and opportunity to move things in a positive way. The fear of not moving, because of well, the fear of moving things.
I feel like I am at the beach and just been salt-water smacked by a large wave, as my back was turned. I barely just saw the wave coming out of the corner of my eye, (by the way I never would have seen the wave at all without some great teachers who supported me a complete technophobe in becoming somewhat technologically literate)
Anyway, back at the beach, saltwater smack! Then taken out to sea and thrown 20 feet or so into the waves. Now I can swim, sort of, (I am NYC teacher for 22 years after all), but when this happens on the beach things never feel the same, it is a tipping point. When you are finally slammed back down on the sand hard, you feel light-headed like the first day after a bout of a really nasty flu, nothing looks the same and you usually are left with some souvenir bruises and abrasions. I love that feeling!
Ok so how does my day at the beach relate to teaching, information literacy (I hate that term), and what I do as a teacher ? I don’t really know. I just know that something big is coming, in information literacy, and there is a huge resistance to it in education as well as other places.
Resistance to a wave of this magnitude however is pointless, it is going to happen no matter what. This wave, a creative/destructive force, will tear down old worlds and build new ones. Not since the horseless carriage have we seen a wave this big, (as I said resistance is futile, and just so you know the horseless carriage wasn’t actually embraced at its inception either. Stage-coach drivers feared it would put them out of business, and the general population were as scared of these noisy smelly machines as their horses were.) Kind of the way many fields (education) have responded to the read-write web.
Incidentally the big wave is also a children’s book by Pearl S. Buck. It is the story of a tidal wave and 2 boys learning to face a life that is never a sure thing. One of the characters, an old man who lives on the hill, has always intrigued me.
The boy Jiya is from a nearby fishing village that is wiped out in the wave. The orphaned boy goes and lives with the old man. The old man is stunned that after he grows up, he wants to return to be a fisherman, and perhaps face death himself in a future wave. The old man cannot understand why the fisherman again and again rebuild their houses on the shore knowing eventually a wave will come and erase them. I get why they rebuild on the water, they are fishermen and that cannot be erased by any wave. What I don’t get is why they don’t rebuild them in different ways, with more give in the foundations, using different technologies perhaps.
A shift in architectural design might give them and their structures a better chance of surviving the next big wave. I see a real parallel to how we are responding in education to the information tsunami. We are still building the same straw hut fishing village, and hoping for the best.
One thing is sure the big wave is coming, several smaller ones have come already, and the edu-legislators can’t prevent the information tsunami.
So now what?
I had the good fortune to attend the November Learning conference this month in Boston. Four great days with not a lot of sleep, but some great convesations. I had the pleasure of meeting Alan November last year, and started a classroom blog on his weblog hosting site with my students( Our Blog)
It is hard to explain how profoundly blogging changed my classroom, suffice it to say I cannot imagine teaching ( after 22 years) without a blog.
Alan, who came to our district in NYC in July 2005 for 2 days of mind-blowing pd is to say the least extremely inspiring, but his message is more important than his presence.
If I read his message right, it is that the world is changing, and has changed. Students are changing and have changed( for instance 30% of all students have thier own blog which means the same kids who hate to write in classrooms across the country, go home and write in some form nightly without being forced).Not only have students changed but more importantly the way students learn has changed. In contrast to these facts the way we teach has not changed in pace with the changes in our students or the world. In some cases our teaching has not changed at all.
This was amazing to me. I always thought of myself as a good teacher, innovative, never taught the same thing the same way two years in a row. I wrote grants, created projects for classes that engaged my students on many different levels. Always attempted to give my students” authentic” experiences in and out of the classroom. But I am a bibliophile. I love books, and more importantly the process of reading. I think the process of reading changed my life. When I became a technology coordinator, I actually cried because I loved teaching with books, and felt that nothing could ever replace them. I still do not think that anything can replace books. That said, after the conference and my year blogging with my kids I am begining to see just how powerful these tools, internet, blogging, podcasts, social-bookmarking, etc… can be.
The ability of students to respond with immediacy and connectively is daunting. Never mind the piece that everyone on the web is their potential audience.( 22 years of teaching has taught me nothing if it has not taught me that kids find an authentic audience a powerful motivator)
So now I am thinking of how I will re-design my classroom to incorporate and take advantage of the power these amazing tools offer?
