THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

If you have not seen the movie Julie/Julia you should. Not only because it is fun and Meryl Streep is always great, but because it is a great example of why the Internet has changed the way we live, work and learn.

The movie’s main plot revolves around Julie Powell, who lives in Queens with her husband, and her attempt to cook every receipt in Julia Child’s cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. The other half of the movie follows Julia Child, who is living in France in 1949, as she learns to cook and struggles to write and publish the cookbook.

Julie Powell starts a blog, this is 2002 just when blogging starts to become popular, as a way to chronicle her life and cooking. As the movie moves back and forth between the two women and their lives you start to see how quickly life has change due to computers and the Internet.

It takes Julia 2 years using a manual typewriter to do the first draft of the cookbook. Julie uses a computer to write her blog everyday. Julia has several false starts as she and her co-writers try to get a publisher interested in their cookbook. Julie’s blog starts to be read by hundreds of people and she is featured in a NY Times article. This exposure gets her several offers from book publishers.  Julie write a book, Julie and Julia: 365 Day, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which is popular and becomes the movie Julie/Julia.

As I was watching Julia Child struggle to publish her book I was struck how different it is today. Julia, like Julie, could have self-published through a blog or wiki. She could have made videos and posted them on YouTube, or use a self-publishing tool like Lulu and sold it on Amazon. Today anyone can become an author or a make a move, it is just that not all of them will be at Barnes & Noble or at the movies.

In case you don’t know, Mozilla is the parent of Firefox, Thunder Bird, and other free open source applications. Mozilla grew out of Netscape and Firefox is now the second most used browser (300 million users) after Internet Explorer.

In this talk at WordCamp in San Francisco, Mozilla CEO John Lilly, talks about 7 insights and 2 problems in Mozilla.

Insights:

1. Superior products matter
2. Without excellent experience and utility the rest is meaningless
3. Communication will happen every possible way, make sure it is reusable
4. Make it easy for you community to do the important things
5. Surprise is over rated, it is the opposite of engagement
6. Communities are not markets, members are citizens
7. The key is the art of figuring out whether and how to apply each of these ideas

Problems:

1. Engaged citizens are noisy
2. At scale there are no maps

So what does this have to do with education? It has everything to do with education because the 18th century model no longer works and we need to look at what is working in the world of open source. Education, like American auto makers, is being forced to change and the transition will not be pretty. So watch John Lilly’s talk and see if you agree.

T.H.E. Journal reports that Texas is leaving the door open for schools to purchase electronic textbooks in addition to paper books.

While this change does not take education to the totally open and flexible iTunes purchasing model as some would prefer, it does provide significant flexibility to districts. In addition, it opens up the Texas market to a large number of companies that heretofore had no chance to compete. For the basal publishers that have owned the market, creativity and flexibility will, or at least should, become a new mantra.

California’s e-learning proposial is stil being sorted out.

There are already worrying signs that California is trying to go digital on a shoestring. Traditionally, publishers provide schools with a complete package: student textbooks, teacher’s guides with sample lessons and tests, and teacher training courses. In the emerging model, teachers must assemble their own package, combining e-books with free course “wikis” (shared online resources any user can update or revise), and networking with other teachers over the web to share best practices. It’s a new responsibility some would prefer to avoid.

The digital divide needs to be closed not just in hardware, but even more important in what to do with the hardware and software. Most teachers are not online in any significat way and and have never created a wiki or blog. Schools will have to open up their filtering and the 19th century modle of edcation will have to be scraped.

The 1:1 wireless laptop classroom is still in the process of being developed. Jake (IT) and I put a package together of 12 Lenovo netbooks, an HP for the teacher, a mimio capture system, and an LCD projector. The classroom has 12 special ed students who learn differently. At the present time there are 8 desktops in various stages of usefulness.

I have been working weekly in the classroom introducing different Web 2.0 tools to the students and the teacher. The students have epal email accounts, a Delicious account and the class has a wiki. The teacher is very excited about the laptops and is eager to learn about integrating technology into the curriculum. She will be going to the MassCUE Technology Leadership Symposium with myself, Jake and 3 other teaches. None of these teaches have been to an edtech conference. If their first exposure to several hundred educators excited about the changes technology can bring to education is anything like mine, their approach to teaching will be changed.

Well I did it, sent in my proposal for a workshop at the M.A.S.S Technology Conference. I have been telling everyone that will listen about Wikinomics and Here Comes Everybody and that these are two books educators need to read. So when the RFP for the conference showed up in my email I decided to go for it. I have had my own doubts about who am I to bring this to a superintendents convention, I am just a teacher. But, in the spirit of wikinomics anyone can contribute to the knowledge of the many.

I decided to use the power of the wikinomics concept to help me write the proposal and posted it on the edubloggescon.com wiki and asked for feedback, no one responded. It is mid-summer and many educators are taking time to relax and recharge for the next school year. I will keep the wiki page up and ask for feedback from educators who have read either book.

I just got (9/10) an email about the superintendents tech conference and I did not get chosen to present. Looking over the list of presenters it should be a conference worth going to, too bad I can’t. I plan to keep developing this topic because it is important that educators understand the “perfect storm” of changes that are happening due to technological changes that make it easier to share, peer create, and act globally.

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At Harvard Feb, 2008

I was one of about 80 people that tuned into the Will Richardson interview of Clay Shirky today. Will used Ustream to conduct the interview so that it would be streamed live and recorded for later viewing. Of course a chat was going on along with the interview, and Will invited questions from the “audience”. As most Internet technologies are today, it was glitchy and at one point Will lost his Internet connection and had to reboot.

The interview only lasted about 40 minutes and Will only got to two questions. Clay is a very practiced speaker and was to the point in the discussion. The topic of the discussion was about how the concepts in his book affect education. The main point I got from the interview, which I plan to watch again, was that we have had a revolution in the way knowledge is transferred or taught.

If you wanted to learn from Plato you had to go where he was and speak directly with him. After he died there was no way to easily access his teachings and his knowledge died with him. As writing further developed a limited number of book were written, but they were still difficult to access and not many people could read them. Transfer of knowledge was still limited in time and place. When the printing press was invented it made books more available and time and space became more flexible. You had access to knowledge from people who were not even in your country or alive, but direct access to the alive person was still very limited. It could be years before a book became available new knowledge may have been developed by the time the book was published. The telephone, film and TV has made access to knowledge and education even more immediate and accessible. But, from most people the access to knowledge still happens in an education setting.

Clay is suggesting that the reason for physical schools is that it is the most cost effective way to distrubite knowledge to the greated number of people. He goes on to say the a “tectonic shift” is occuring in the way groups are formed, business is conducted and knowledge is trasnfered because of the Internet and social network tools. Today’s interview is an example of the breaking down of the time/place/access to knowledge. Clay was in New York City, Will Richardson was in New Jersey, I was in Belchertown, MA, and the other 80 participants were all over the world. We all participted in a live event that was coordiated by one person for free. Beside observing the interview we were able to ask Clay and Will questions and there was a chat going on with the 80 participants. I did not have to sign up for a class with Clay Shirly at NYU or travel to London to attend a lecture. I am reading his book now and I have read his blog and watched two recordings of lectures he has given. I doubt that I would have had access to the video recordings of his lectures before the Internet. Even if a televison station would have thought it was worth their time and effort to record his lecture, the recording would have been show once or twice and then put in a vault some where at a university for some curious grad student to view it in 10 years.

As the the cost of orgaizating access to distributed knowledge decreases, will students be satisfied with having to travel to a central building to sit in rows and listen to a one-way conversation of a pre-determainded curriculum?

I listened to two very interesting podcast today from Edtech Talk (they all seem to be interesting). Edtech Talk is part of the World Bridges Network, a collection of educational podcasts anyone can take part in, check their calendar for the latest daily podcast.

TTT#98

The first podcast is “Teachers Teaching Teachers # 98 – Learning to be unschooly” The conversation included teachers and students from around the world and its subject was triggered by a post on Youth Twitter by a South Korean student named Soojin. The term schooliness was coined by Clay Burell in his blog. The podcast discussion focused on how to use the Read/Write web to engage students in authentic learning and not as a fancy worksheet.

From elgg to DrupalThe second podcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers #99 – From elgg to Drupal, was very timely because I have been having a discussion with our executive director and curriculum director about developing a CMS. I have used Moodle for a couple of years, but it was installed on our ISP, which we no longer use. I have looked at Joomla, Drupal, and elgg, but don’t know much about any of them. Bill Fitzgerald from DrupalEd was in on the conversation and his advice for anyone wanting to implement a CMS is to write in one or two sentences the goal of the CMS. Dave Cormier advised to write a very detailed description of what several students would do in the course of a day using the technology. Dave is the teacher who helped developed “A partnership project helping Prince Edward Island students bring the past to life using tools of the future.” A Living Archives uses Drupal.

The good thing is that there are many quality choices for a school based CMS.

Exposing students to Big Ideas is a great way to get them excited about the world and hopefully school. Even special ed students can get excited by Big Ideas. I showed this TED Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks to the students in the PREP math classes and they wanted to get a Wii remote and try it themselves. The fact that they felt they could get the free software and instructions and make their own interactive white board is encouraging. We have Smart Boards in our school and we have them use them, so they are very familiar with how interactive white boards function. We ran out of time this year to hack a Wii, but I plan to work with the students to do it next school year

I have finally started listening to Wikinomics (download from Audible). As much as I enjoy listening to the book on the ride to work and home, I miss being able to highlight and make notes in the margins. I do bookmark with my Zen Micro so that I can go back and make notes later. I should have read it a year ago and I would now have a better idea of the changes happening in front of our eyes. The industrial revolution took hundreds of years to develop and make significant changes in peoples lives. The digital revolution is happening in one life time and most people are not aware of it. It is still rare that when I mention wiki to someone they know what I am talking about. I keep assuming that I am the one who has missed the boat and other professionals are blogging and podcasting. Listening to the book I am more convinced that the education system is a relic of the 18th century and just by a force of nature it will change. The choices are that we make the changes conscience and as smooth as possible or unconscience with disruptive changes.

Speaking of podcasting it is time I had my own if I am to teach other how to create and us podcasts. We did create classroom podcasts last year at Glenbrook Middle School, but those are gone now. I want to podcast some blog entries like Wes Fryer and do some interview.

Having the cluster map has maked posting to the blog much more interesting, now I know someone somewhere has at least looked at the blog. They may have been searching for windhorse (a Buddhist term) and this popped up, what a disappointment.