Will Richardson A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything
Posted by psteffen on July 20, 2006
A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything Presentation
This was my favorite presentation at NECC – it was thought provoking and invigorating.
He shared that it is not about technology, but about imagination and he shared the imagination of Kyle MacDonald and One Red Paper Clip and how students are creating mashups.
The web is our students reality – 1 billion people are connected, there are 10 billion pages and 1 trillion places you can click. We must educate students not just to consume content on the web but to contribute. Use blogs to connect – we are at a turning point with blogs. There are 50+ million blogs and 70,000 new blogs each day. There are 69,000 education blogs. Technorati is a great search engines for blogs. The New York Times quotes that there are 25+ million kids creating content online. He gave an example of Matthew Bischoff podcasting from his bedroom, his 8 year old daughter Tess and her Weather Recipes on Flickr and students in Pre-Cal30S having a Scribe Hall of Fame.
It is a society of authorship – people can come together in groups at Flickr like people into vegaffiti. Thomas Friedman calls them “uploaders.”
This is a big change for schools – it is no longer 4 walls – MIT has provided their open courseware for any student to learn. We are moving from “Do your own work” to “work with others.” He gave the example of the student who needed to write a report and went to Wikipedia and posted a beginning and he watched as other people edited and made it better for him. He did get caught when he turned it in. But this hits at many issues from how smart the students are to the fact that we need to have students creating higher-level thinking assignments where they construct knowledge.
The web changes textbooks – South Africa is using wiki books. It is a society of Rip, Mix and Learn. Teachers need to be the connectors and help kids connect with experts and mentors and then get out of the way. We shouldn’t focus on “how many predators are out there” but “how many teachers are available.” Think of the teacher as a DJ making playlists about MLK or the content. Digg is a site about user powered content. Bering Strait School District has an open content initiative that is developing a comprehensive standards-based curriculum and a set of supporting content resources using “wiki” technology which allows everyone to read, edit, and participate directly in an innovative education community.
The web changes learning, Will says that he has learned more from blogging and being passionate than he did from any educational institution. The learner decides what, when, where and how he/she learns. The most important thing is not learning content, but learning how to learn.
We need to move from “just in case” learning to “just in time” learning.
Will asked a great question – our students read in hypertext where they link and move from page to page, but who is teaching them to write in hypertext?
Education used to be easy, we gave the students the textbook and asked them to read it, now they have the Internet and must evaluate information.
The Internet is changing everything, now there are programs like Jumpcut that allow you to edit video on the web. What needs to change in our schools when our kids can publish to a larger audience than our classroom?
One of the challenges in education is how do we deal with our fears with wikis and social networking like MySpace. We cannot put a cork in MySpace. When kids get together they don’t ask for phone numbers they ask for MySpace accounts. But who is teaching kids about My Space – we need to model effective uses of social networking. We can see from the list of social networking sites that we cannot put a cork in them.
Will shared a wonderful post from Chris Lehmann about what to tell superintendents.
We take the tools out of students hands when they walk into our schools. What can we do to move forward.
csmythe said
I agree that Will Richardson’s presentation was the most exhilarating of the conference. He didn’t say things about digital literacy and the read/write web that I haven’t heard before, but his intelligence, enthusiasm and eloquence were like a shot of adrenalin. One of my favorites of the many sites he mentioned is http://www.43things.com. I’m not sure about its educational value, but it is a great example of the web’s ability to bring people together at the most personal level. I really hope we can get Will in Tucson for AzTea or the Literacy Conference or at my house!
), I really think we need educators who devote themselves to helping teachers integrate technology into their classrooms. Tech Trainers and Coaches do an admirable job, but you simply cannot be a full time classroom teacher and do justice to great inservicing. They need someone as terrific as Peggy at every school. Good luck!
Many of the issues that Peggy raises about “control” are my concerns as well. I think that Richardson’s implied message is that “controlling” students’ participation on the web is a myth and that we should just get over it. Sounds great, but I wonder about the liabilities.
I also get overwhelmed with the myriad of choices in applications to accomplish similar activities. Frankly, there are so many blog and wiki possibilities, it’s a bit daunting to get started. I hope we can collaborate and decide on some “best solutions,” but things evolve so quickly it’s hard to get started.
I’m also struck by the chorus of presenters who suggest that the best solutions are often open-source or web-based applications. Unfortunately, our district is moving to being more reliant on commercial developers like Microsoft. Experience tells me that we will never have the money available to sustain either the software or hardware requirements of this plan. We cannot keep up with the hardware demands of Windows and the constant upgrades of Office. The result is that we are running five operating systems (including Macs) and six of our most important core application (Office). This is crazy! As a trainer, I spend way too much time telling people that “this may not work the same (or at all) on your computer.” Open-source software is lean, efficient and sustainable on most of our current workstations. OpenOffice is a great example and Moodle is another. I’m not sure how to change the minds of those who make these decisions, but I think we need to start to clamor. Even though there is talk of a new bond issue, that money is still a temporary fix and we’ll be in the same boat in five years or less.
Lastly, I saw some great presenters like Will Richardson, Tim Wilson and Lynell Burmark. And I saw some mediocre presenters. Great professional development informs and inspires. Bad professional development just reinforces all the issues teachers like to gripe about. Good technology training is as much about getting people excited about the possibilities of technology in education as it is about learning how to use it. In this age of built-in and on-line help, FAQs and user groups, showing people how to do something may be far less important that getting them to think about how they can use it. They can teach themselves much of the “how to.” Great professional development takes time to put together, and although I have tremendous respect for our team of technology trainers (after all, I am one
lscheffel said
I have to say that at first I was one of those people who thought that students needed to be protected from the “bad” content on the web. But the more I learn about the fascinating “stuff” taking place out there, the more I feel that our role as educators is to teach students how to be critical of what they see and read, and be responsible about what they post. There is so much content out there, that students need to knwo how to find what they need. I also believe that the whole education system will need to change to respond to this *new* technology. I see the teacher’s role even more as facilitator and guide, and students interacting in ways that weren’t really possible even a few years ago. There are limitless real-world projects that students can do and a whole world of information out there! This just reinforced for me how important collaboration is. Students can now effortlessly collaborate with virtually everyone around the world. How exciting! The scary part for me now is, how do we get the teachers and schools ready for this???
loros said
The site that I viewed was Technorati. It includes blogs in the areas of
entertaiment, life and sports. The site is very popular among all ages especially children and young adults. I was particulary interested in looking though the site because blogging is one of the tools that my partner and I use for teaching in our SEI class. On of the reasons we included blogging was to communicate to teachers that it is a program that can be used to differentiate learning. It is interesting to see some of the feeback that we get from blogging. The following is a comment from one of our classes:
“This is too much for my grade level. This is too much for me. Some 21st skills don’t mean anything if people can’t just talk to each other face to face. What happens when computers fail or we reach the limit of what can be done with them? I feel we need more of a back to basics approach. Lets talk about being kind and researching in books as well as a computer. Lets learn how to talk on the phone instead of “blogging”.
I can understand why teaching our children to speak to one another is important. It develops their language and socials skills. Blogging is just another way of teaching our students to communicate. We must not forget that we are moving into a technologyical age and as a tech coach I have a responsibility to communicate the importance of 21st century skills in the classroom.
The majority of teachers are not familiar with
mwarrick said
I’m very intriqued by the “Scribe Hall of Fame” for several reasons. One, I teach math and all the blogging is math relatrd relavent to this Pre-Calculus class. Two, I want to know how the students made all the graphs and color in the blog. And third, what a awesome way for students to transform their knowledge. Once a student leaves a blog with that detail and information, they know it! However, I ‘m sure they spent hours on it. With all of them pitching in on, the task is doable. Plus, what a great resource for students who were absent a particular day. I must look further into this.