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.
The Media Lab created a nonprofit association, 