[This session is being live blogged. Ignore the misspellings and awkward wordings]
[This post is simul-blogged at Multi-faceted Refractions]
The Read/Write Web – Conference Handout (willrichardson.wikispaces.com)
Refer’s to Karl Fisch’s Did You Know presentation.
It is about teaching children to become life-long learners.
Connectivity and transparency will become more acute, not going away.
Other entities reacting to the change – Election 2008 is beginning to change how politics is changing – used Obama Social Networking site. Don’t need physical space, limits connection of passionate individuals like never before.
Went to mySpace – but it was blocked. Every candidate has a page on mySpace – first caucus will be on mySpace in January 2008.
Journalism and media is changing. 70% of traffic is file sharing. Digital Rights management is dead.
Every story on USA Today online is a blog post and can be commented.
Business is going to change. IBM has 20,000 wikis, 400,000 are using a social networking networking.
Refers to Wikinomics and Cluetrain Manifesto. Not about the product, but conversations around the product. Everyone changing, but education is stuck. Not responding quick enough.
15% of attendees have mySpace or Facebook, nearly 75% of students have accounts.
Expectation is that we share. Students don’t look at privacy the way we do. Creates a disconnect. 1:1 schools have more opportunities.
Last few years, students have diverged from the teacher’s paths and they are not coming back.
How do we bridge the gap?
What has transformed Will’s learning is his ability to connect and create networked of passionate learners. Need to create personal learning networks which will sustain and help them make sense of the world, help them forge new ideas.
Huge shift in number of bloggers. What is disconcerning to Will is that teachers simply publish them in a different way and not understand the shift of pedagogy. It is a lack of understanding of how networks work. Used current post about raw food to show example. Currently, there are 30 comments, to help push and shape the message. Look at thread, there is a huge amount of learning.
Will is findable, which is extremely important for his learning. Six on Google search of “Will”. Students are building networks on their own. Shows Fan Fiction site. They are figuring things out, while we are not. Learning is 24/7/365, if you want it to be.
Showed a mySpace page and then Meg Cabot’s mySpace. Can connect, but we block hese sites. The upside is not being recognized by teachers, they are not going away.
Showed Clarence Fisher’s class blogs (had to play imagine that) Did a post on the Nata Village in Africa and she got comments from the villagers.
It is not about what is in the texts, but who is in their networks and how they constuct them.
Nowhere in curriculum are students learning how to access information via cellular technology. How to find using a variety of different tools.
Showed OpenCourseware at MIT and the $100 laptop program. Need to find mentors (teachers) and make them smart consumers. They will learn about subjects not just in our classroom, but now have many different approaches.
Wikipedia is one of the most important web site in Will’s mind, but most don’t visit the history tab and discussion tab, where the conversation is occurring.
Shared the Google doc example – plagiarism is a conversation we are going to have to again and again. Showed wikipedia changes – 500 changes in last 3 minutes. Have to figure out how to teach.
More and more of what we read has not been edited in the same way as before? Who edits the blog? Everyone needs to edit everyone. We need to model editing and be skeptical consumers of information.
Need to teach to read and write in hypertext rich environments. How do you teach this literacy and do it well. The world is linked. If students are not writing with links, connecting with conversations, they will not be prepared for the future.
We have to change our practice of teaching. If you have an Internet connection, job shifts to connecting students to the smartest people, may not be you.
We can connect our students to mentor who can motivate and engage our students in ways which we cannot. This can be powerful. Showed example of the Flat Classroom Project.
Can’t deliver curriculum, teach how to create networks to support life-long learning. Connections are the transformation. It is not what I know, but what I learn. Need to teach the literacy so that they are not duped and misled.
Most examples are digital replication of analog practices. This is very different. Need to talk about these tools with the adults. What is stopping you from bringing this into your practice? Who are your teachers? Are you a life-long learners? How are you connecting? How are you growing your networks? You have to become a participant. How are you modeling your learning?