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but why don’t teachers understand this? To figure this out we need to understand this philosophically and historically. Doctors, in the mid-19th Century resisted technologies as most teachers do now. Lister and Pasteur were “so far ahead of the curve they weren’t on the same road” when they suggested sterilization. Doctors of the time, seeing themselves as “healers” could not comprehend that they were killing half of their patients by resisting the technologies of the time – the belief system inherent in the identity model of the profession actually prevented them from being what they perceived themselves to be.

Part of this is because we teach neither history nor philosophy. We do not share with teachers why Socrates opposed literacy, or what Gutenberg destroyed. We do not allow them to understand the essential humanness of technology, or to understand technology in Heidegger’s terms – the art of manipulating the world for our benefit.

Now I don’t know what Glogster is, but I do know that every technology gives and takes. The book disabled hundreds of millions and wiped out hundreds of languages. It also spread learning and allowed both the novel and eventually journalism to appear. And I know that our students must have the philosophical grounding in what technology is, how to learn it, and how to use it, that so many of our current teachers lack. After all, the classroom is filled with technology – chairs and desks (1835 via William Alcott), chalkboards (1840 via William Alcott), Time schedules (1845 via Henry Barnard), Books (1840s, mostly Henry Barnard), testing (1910, the Carnegie Commission), even ballpoint pens – that highly controversial 1950s invention of Marcel Bich. And all of those technologies have benefits and real limits.

I’m not really focused on, nor do I think Scott is focused on, “administrative technologies” but on “educational technologies.” A gradebook – I might argue, is no more an “educational technology” than a file cabinet is.

What I think we are discussing is transformational technologies. Technologies whereuse alters the learning process.

I need to say two things: First, and I think this is a big part of Scott’s target here, every school administrator, every policy maker, and every tech director making “blocking decisions,” needs to wake up and take responsibility for keeping our current century away from education.

But – in the end – a big part of this remains “taking responsibility for your own learning.” The first free seminars in these systems which I offered were presented in 1998, and at that point there was already a massive research base for what Scott is saying here. The laws regarding technology access in terms of students with disabilities (and those with “504″ plans) were placed on the books in 1995. IBM was promoting speech recognition and text-to-speech in 1996, and Lynne Anderson-Inman was already proving the value of “digital texts” and “digital notebooks” and digitally linked note-taking in the mid-1990s.

Jerrid, Troy, and everyone… The issue is this - In order to be lifelong learners it is essential to understand and know how to function with the information and communications technologies of our world, and to know how to adapt when those technologies change. In order to be human successes we also must understand how to communicate what we know, how to collaborate, and how to distribute information. This is why Socrates drilled his students on memory. In pre-literate Greece, that was the essential tool. This is why we taught “reading” (meaning decoding ink-on-paper alphabetic texts) in school, and why we taught writing with pens and pencils, and why we introduced students to libraries. In the Gutenberg era these were the essential tools.

But, when kids are writing, I want them to (among other things) be able to communicate with Grandma even if Grandma lives thousands of miles away, even if Grandma is blind, even if Grandma speaks another language. And if they are reading, I don’t want them limited to the 2,000 “age appropriate” books and 1975 World Book Encyclopedia in the local public library.

Newspaper readership, yes a minority, but a rapidly changing environment http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news with (in 2009) only 25% of Americans getting news from print daily.

The change is occurring across the “print world” – Amazon, 19 July 2010: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

The lack of real history of education courses is what leaves so many teachers completely unaware of why schools do what they do, and leaves them confused about what the tools of education are.

Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.

Networks are ideal as enhancements for all four of these essential activities of lifelong learners, and they enable us to model, demonstrate, practice, and reflect constantly and effectively.

“teachers who practice autonomy in their own professional development formulate heuristics for harvesting knowledge within their personal learning spaces, and thus stand a better chance of inculcating the desired behaviors in their students, thus increasing the likelihood of producing potentially autonomous and lifelong learners. But it is a percolative process.

The wiki allowed anyone (anyone could write on it, not just Webheads) to leave an email address if they needed an invitation, and those who had spare invitations would give one to someone in need. The system worked to organize a quick and robust Webheads Wave, a sandbox for teachers to try out the tool and to model and demonstrate and practice with one another.

Networks provide the framework for this to happen.

Pedagogy

Networking

Literacy

Paradigm shift results when many people in a community or network follow the same process of seeing things modeled and demonstrated for one another in such a way that after considered reflection and weighing of the old and new ways of addressing a problem, they gradually alter their practice.

Heuristics

hose with knowledge and those seeking it treat each other equally, often reversing roles frequently as seekers and providers of knowledge and content.

multiliteracies approaches

When the Writing for Webheads group of students and teachers formed in 1998, participants were distrustful of sending their pictures to strangers on the Internet, and even to reveal their real names.

Photographs and voice/webcam communications enable group members to see the human behind the text message and enhance bonds leading to a sense of community

Scaffolding one another’s practice by modeling to one another and answering each other’s questions

the evolution of social media has enabled the Webheads CoP to interact with others to become part of a much wider distributed learning network.

Siemens has long espoused the notion of connectivism, famously summarized as “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” (Siemens, 2004, n.p.). Here, Siemens means that it is more important to nurture a system of connections between knowledgeable people (the pipe) than to be concerned with what these knowledgeable people know (the content within the pipe) since this content can be directed as needed to anyone with appropriate connections within the pipe.

Communities and networks help us to aggregate, filter, and assimilate this information into some kind of knowledge structure and then disseminate it throughout the community or network.

distributed learning networks (DLN’s), or personal or professional learning networks (PLNs), or personal learning environments (PLE’s)–all provide direct (and indirect) contact with many people in one’s network, each possessing a reservoir of knowledge which contributes to the entire pool of knowledge residing in the network. This can be accessed through listservs or sometimes almost instantaneously through Twitter or RSS feeds, or Skype, or instant messaging. Therefore the knowledge possessed by any individual, or node in the network, is the sum total of all aggregated knowledge within that network. It is to this that we ascribe the incredible power inherent in distributed learning networks which often comprise to some extent communities of practice.

Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002, p. 6) promote the CoP model as an anecdote to the fact, as he puts it, that “increasing complexity of knowledge requires greater … collaboration; whereas … the half life of knowledge is getting shorter.”

the skill of leveraging networks is increasingly important in the 21st century in plumbing and aggregating knowledge when that knowledge base is forever changing at an increasingly accelerated pace.

or appropriate use of online social networks to be taught in schools, teachers themselves must be familiar with their impact on learning. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for their trainees by showing them how to reach out to networks.

research indicates that teachers don’t necessarily activate the knowledge they are exposed to in training curricula. The example he gave was on reverting to traditional methods rather than utilizing knowledge about communicative language teaching (Richards, 2009: 4), but the same applies to knowledge of technology.

In order for training in pedagogical affordances of networking to take hold it is crucial that teachers be trained not only in social media, but through its use. Those who use social media in their professional networking find this self-evident, but there is at least annecdotal evidence for the need for modeling by mentors.

teachers need to be shown the connections between their use of social media in their personal and professional lives. Glogowski and Sessums pointed out in their presentation at the WiAOC 2007 conference their surprise that student teachers who were already using technology with online acquaintances in their after-hours social networking were not carrying this over into their professional teaching practices.

Lévi-Strauss invites us to consider literary freedom (or, more generally, "book culture") as a spandrel in the sense that Stephen Jay Gould employed the term: something that evolves not towards its own end, but because it doesn't impede (and may in fact support) other forces. I think Lévi-Strauss's hypothesis is interesting to consider because it posits our present book culture as an exception, rather than something that naturally happens because of the flow of economic or historical forces.

For a piece entitled "This Progress," Sehgal emptied the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim of its art: the visitor ascending the ramp was met by a small child, who asks you to explain what you think progress is. You do this as best you can; there's a back and forth, and this conversation carries on up the spiral. At a certain point, you're met by a high school student, who continues the conversation; then a young adult; and finally an older adult, who walks with you to the top-most point in the Guggenheim. There's a great deal of careful choreography going on, so the conversation breaks and remakes itself across your offerent interlocutors – but what's centrally interesting about the piece is that the visitor is engaged in a sustained conversation with strangers about the idea of progress. There's something deeply strange about this: post-college, we so rarely engage in conversations about abstract ideas. It's equally odd to be engaging with people who aren't your age: the way on talks to a six-year-old is necessarily different from the way one talks to a sixty-year-old. This can be deeply engrossing: on a visit a few Mondays ago, my friend Nik and I went up (with others) and down (together) five times in four hours.

Going up the spiral with a friend doesn't work as well as you might expect: the dynamics of a conversation with a stranger are very different from a converstion with a stranger and a friend.

One quickly discovers that what happens when one ascends the spiral is different every time, though the structure is constant. Some conversations are interesting; some are less so. Some are over quickly; some carry on so long that you worry that you've fallen out of the piece entirely. While some of the rules can be easily understood

some aren't so obvious.

One quickly discovers the limitations of language: progress, we think, is the idea that things move forward, but that doesn't explain why something in front of something is naturally better: it's simply a structure of our thought that we construe things in front of us (or above us) as things we aspire to in some way. It's hard not to think in this way when ascending a ramp, though weirdly the ramp as metaphor doesn't seem to arise.

k wanted to know, were we essentially different from the Greeks?

Greek professor

The difference, the man finally confided, was that the Greeks didn't have our idea of progress. He thought they were probably happier because of that.

why was there the this in the piece's title "This Progress"? Perhaps it's because progress only exists as an idea when we lend credence to it: our own personal idea of progress rather than something that exists naturally. Awareness of this is important. We need to interrogate the idea of progress, both in terms of what we believe and what society around us believes. Too often we're simply swept along by the flow of time. The power of the idea – the power of the thought experiment, whether Lévi-Strauss's questioning of the goal of writing or Sehgal's questioning of progress – is that it allows reclamation of agency.

It's confusing at first, but it is also flowing.

Yes, we're a collective intelligence, which is exhilarating, but we're a toddler collective intelligence, stumbling around learning to walk and trying to figure out where we're going at the same time. A number of new skills are required in short order. Information and communication flow through multiple simultaneous channels. The enterprise is challenging - that's part of the exercise. Taking my direction from George Siemens' ideas about networked learning ("we emphasize that early course experiences tend to be overwhelming and chaotic") I assure co-learners early and often that we can relax, accept and even embrace the chaos, and regard our networked attempts to make sense of it as the scaffold for our co-learning. 

Instead of seeking to put every fact in its place in an existing well-ordered taxonomy, why not seek to learn together by asking questions about what puzzles us, then organizing our discussions and mining them for knowledge?

Sometimes, I get into predicaments and don't know how to quit a webtour or place people in breakout rooms. So I calmly start exploring possible solutions, talking about it as I try to recover. While doing so, I also talk about the importance of exploring close enough to the edge to fall over it frequently. I model tolerance for error, learning from error, pushing the envelope of tech. Indeed, I've found that the earlier I can break something and fix it in public, the better. We talk about what works and what doesn't, discard what doesn't suit our purposes, push a tool further if it helps us learn together. It requires regular doses of humility to abandon what seemed like a bright idea at the time.

The objective is a culture of conversation that troubleshoots practical skills, explores theoretical underpinnings, dissects social implications.

Our internal social bookmarks enable us to create a mini-collective-intelligence by gathering resources about our discussion topics, selecting or writing descriptive snippets, assigning tags. The emerging tag-cloud serves as an index to the resources.

Wiki-work is about collaborative authoring.

In the process of using these tools to try to make sense together, we co-construct our learning. The last week of the course is about re-examining our learning process, reiterating the most important things we've learned, and redesigning the parts of the process that didn't work so well.

The launch this year of Google Voice — representing as it does a free alternative or complement to costly language laboratory recording hardware and software — has profound and exciting implications for student engagement in general and the confluence of language instruction and cell phone technology in particular. The proliferation of cell phones among today’s students combined with the development of such new computer-mediated communication tools allows teachers to engage students in new ways in and out of the classroom.

My Google Voice number has served primarily as a messaging service students call (sometimes spontaneously during the instructional period, more often outside of the classroom) to record dialogues, poetry, even song, either individually or in pairs. These recordings are stored on Google servers, but can be downloaded and posted on course management pages (Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, etc.) or podcasting, blogging, or social networking sites (I post particularly good recordings on my Spanish Facebook page).

maximizing student engagement during the class period is essential, as many students work and do not practice outside the classroom setting. Without getting into the debate over the front-end need for considerable comprehensible input, as a practical matter many students see paired work time (particularly in larger classes) as social time, which can lead to student-teacher conflict (no explanation needed).

for lower level classes I can instruct my students to form small groups and, within a given time frame, call my Google Voice number and record a narration of an illustration or picture sequence. In the higher level classes, I can ask groups to come up with a succinct recorded comparison/contrast analysis of two different perspectives (textual and/or auditory) on a given subject. Either way, embracing whole language oral output turns the focus from the particulars of language and writing to whole language and pronunciation. It also allows for efficient instructor identification of common problem points.

It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.

on a post-recording survey of a Spanish 3 class of 21 students, I asked students to respond anonymously to the following survey question:“I practice my Spanish pronunciation before calling Google Voice… not at all once more than once repeatedly”A total of 89 percent of the 21 respondents answered either “b,” “c,” or “d,” with 26 percent responding “repeatedly.” Among the more entertaining and pertinent written comments offered on the anonymous survey were the following: “AHH!! I feel smart because I actually practice a lot before I call.” “It makes me nervous having to record, but I practice a lot to help me get over that.” “I do not do the Google Voice because I don’t want the whole class to hear me.”The final comment clearly referred to my tendency to play recordings for full class feedback — food for thought. Is that a motivating or inhibiting factor? It probably depends on the student.

A student who was frustrated at his performance in Spanish and was beginning to exhibit some anger management issues received the following Spanish translation of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote via text message through Google Voice: Por cada minuto que estás enojado, pierdes sesenta segundos de felicidad. I did not supply a translation

The access that I had to that student combined with the ease and speed of communication presented by Google Voice solved more than a pronunciation problem; it likely helped me head off a building class management issue by engaging that student on his terms outside of the classroom setting.

“I have a student who hasn’t done any homework this quarter, and out of the blue he sent me a goofy text message to my Google Voice number — completely unrelated to Spanish — something like “I hate this rain”— and, being the nerdy teacher, I texted him immediately back in Spanish: “No me gusta la lluvia tampoco.” One day later, he walks in for the first time with his homework and makes a big production about turning it in. I can’t help but feel that the personal connection of texting helped him remember — and actually want to do — the work for my class.”

Surprisingly, these “irredeemably unreachable” students have proven highly receptive to the notion that their cell phones can and should be used for educational purposes. Figure 2, for example, shows a fairly typical SMS exchange on an oral homework assignment for intermediate level students. While not all students will text back when I supply SMS feedback, those that do, like this one, tend to be looking for specifics and positive reinforcement. How is this additional engagement and interaction bad?

Elite schools have spent vast sums of money on expensive language laboratory hardware and software as an approach to active engagement in the language learning process. They have provided their students with the latest and greatest in computer-assisted (language) learning and computer-mediated communication tools, at considerable cost.