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There is no question that historical eras favor certain personalities and types, and the age of the collaborator is here or coming, depending on where you sit. The era of trusted authority (Time magazine, for instance, when I was young) is giving way to an era of transparent and collaborative scholarship (Wikipedia). The expert is giving way to the collaborator, since 1 + 1 truly equals 3 in this realm.

The combination of 1) an increased ability to work on specialized topics by gathering teams from around the globe, and 2) the diversity of those collaborators, should bring with it an incredible amount of innovation.

That anyone, anywhere in the world, can study using over the material from over 1800 open courses at MIT is astounding, and it's only the start.

I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press

a study that showed that one of the strongest determinants of success in higher education is the ability to form or participate in study groups. In the video of his lecture he makes the point that study groups using electronic methods have almost the exact same results as physical study groups. The conclusion is somewhat stunning--electronic collaborative study technologies = success? Maybe not that simple, but the real-life conclusions here may dramatically alter how we view the structure of our educational institutions. JSB says that we move from thinking of knowledge as a "substance" that we transfer from student to teacher, to a social view of learning. Not "I think, therefore I am," but "We participate, therefore we are." From "access to information" to "access to people" (I find this stunning). From "learning about" to "learning to be." His discussions of the "apprenticeship" model of learning and how it's naturally being manifested on the front lines of the Internet (Open Source Software) are not to be missed.

"differentiated instruction" a reality that both parents and students will demand.

sites that combined several Web 2.0 tools together created the phenomenon of "social networking."

From consuming to producing * From authority to transparency * From the expert to the facilitator * From the lecture to the hallway * From "access to information" to "access to people" * From "learning about" to "learning to be" * From passive to passionate learning * From presentation to participation * From publication to conversation * From formal schooling to lifelong learning * From supply-push to demand-pull

The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.

Participate

Learn About Web 2.0. I

* Lurk.

Teach Content Production.

* Make Education a Public Discussion.

* Help Build the New Playbook.

We've spent the last ten years teaching students how to protect themselves from inappropriate content – now we have to teach them to create appropriate content. They may be "digital natives," but their knowledge is surface level, and they desperately need training in real thinking skills. More than any other generation, they live lives that are largely separated from the adults around them, talking and texting on cell phones, and connecting online.

Those of you with suggestions of other resources, please post comments linking to them

In my senior level strategic management seminar I asked people to break up into groups of three and then distributed a Fortune article about a local firm so that we would all be working with the same course-related content.  I gave them class time to read the article and also provided an organizing framework to help them focus on the main themes regarding the company's business strategy.  I also printed out a blank storyboard using the 3-slide handout feature in MSPowerPoint and distributed a few copies to each group.  Their task was to come to some consensus about the most interesting aspect of the company's strategy and identify the one central point that they wanted to get across in their 2-3 minute presentation.  The only other constraints were that they had to include one slide that highlighted some data that supported their central point and they had to create their storyboard and script in analog form before they opened their laptops. 

I asked each group to create a narrated presentation using either Keynote or PowerPoint, which they then uploaded to a discussion forum in our web-based course management system.  Each student also reviewed at least one other group's presentation, providing feedback on content, as well as the application of the Presentation Zen approach.  I provided feedback in the forum as well, commenting on the presentations themselves and the peer reviews.  Everyone who participated got full credit, which is why I referred to the practice presentation and peer review as a risk-free or low stakes activity.

Provide an example of a presentation that used the Presentation Zen approach, along with the storyboard and script

It also opens the door for viewers to give me feedback on the effectiveness of the design decisions I made and offer suggestions on how to improve my presentation.  I have found that opening up the conversation and giving students permission to review my work helps to strengthen our connection and improves my practice at the same time.  It also helps me demonstrate that it takes time and practice to implement the PZ approach - we are all a work in progress!

My final tip, at least for now, is to give people plenty of opportunities to practice using the Presentation Zen approach and give and receive feedback.  My students decided they wanted to create at least four presentations throughout the course to demonstrate their understanding of course concepts and their ability to apply those concepts to real world examples. 

First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself.

wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society.

This year, I’ve taken pictures in class and then uploaded the pictures to VoiceThread. I record their words for each letter sound using Audacity (another free tool that allows you to record and edit audio on your computer) and a microphone attached to my laptop. At home, I add their recorded voices to the alphabet book.

students’ book. I can export a video of our book, with comments, to bring back into class so we can listen to the additions and see how the book has grown. When we reach the letter Z, I’ll burn the book onto CDs for each of my students, so they’ll have a personal copy of their project.

anyone can add words or comments to my

Because VoiceThread is collaborative,

1-Because of a generous network of teachers on Twitter, my students have a chance to hear English spoken in a lot of different accents, by people who speak English as a first language and by people for whom English is an additional language.

2-They’re learning about countries as we see where our comments come from. 3-They have an invaluable connection with a group of students in New Jersey, who are also learning their letters and sounds, thanks to the efforts of Kim George. My students are mighty impressed with how many words Kim’s students know for each letter! (In fact, you may want to fast forward through a few of the alphabet letters when you check out the project–it has really grown since our first letters!)

4-Since the book is web-based, other classes around the world can “read” our book and it can continue to grow.

1-It gave my students a clear, real reason to use English. It also gave them a real audience to write for. They had something to show for their hard work, something they could share with their friends and grandchildren. 2-My students have a chance to interact with other students through comments. I embedded their project on My Corner of the World (my student blog). While they haven’t yet mastered the art of responding to comments (a few are still figuring out where they might find their email addresses ), they do enjoy reading comments from others. 3-Since it’s web-based, I can share a link with the parents of my young learners class, and they can read the book at home. In fact, anyone around the world can read the book.

Rhetoric is more than just learning a standard structure for an argument. Students should be asking themselves: “How does what we write and what we think change when we know that in ten minutes we can create a blog and broadcast to the world? How does this change How we see and portray ourselves?” These are the deeper rhetorical questions students need to grapple with. It is this focus that will make them stronger readers, writers, and citizens.

We tell students that pictures are a viable means of persuasion, and then we as them to write about it. This hardly reinforces the message. So I thought: “Why not have the students work with the mediums they study, including film?”

I think the class was a success. It taught the students to work with a variety of mediums and to always consider their work as something to share. It is this final point that the entire course hinged on: community. The blog, the group film – everything the students – did was about engaging the world, establishing a presence, and utilizing the tools that the rest of the world is operating with, rather than limiting them to traditional print-based technology.

She was given a course with a group of students who she was told, were struggling with writing and needed, “more structure.” As a response Barbara did the smart thing, and actually gave the students more freedom and control over their education.

However, in order for education to work within the larger structure of integrated societal systems, clear outcomes are still needed.

How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?

I’ve come to view teaching as a critical and needed activity in the chaotic and ambiguous information climate created by networks. In the future, however, the role of the teacher, the educator, will be dramatically different from the current norm. Views of teaching, of learner roles, of literacies, of expertise, of control, and of pedagogy are knotted together. Untying one requires untying the entire model.

Most likely, a teacher will be one of the more prominent nodes in a learner’s network. Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants.

A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.

The curator, in a learning context, arranges key elements of a subject in such a manner that learners will “bump into” them throughout the course. Instead of explicitly stating “you must know this”, the curator includes critical course concepts in her dialogue with learners, her comments on blog posts, her in-class discussions, and in her personal reflections. As learners grow their own networks of understanding, frequent encounters with conceptual artifacts shared by the teacher will begin to resonate.

When I first started learning about the internet (pre-web days), I felt like I had stepped into a alternate realm with its own norms of behaviour and conduct. Bulletin boards and chat rooms presented a challenging mix of navigating social protocols while developing technical skills. By engaging with these conversation spaces – and forming a few tentative connections with others – I was able to find a precarious foothold in the online medium.

Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.

Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.

Imagine a course where the fragmented conversations and content are analyzed (monitored) through a similar service. Instead of creating a structure of the course in advance of the students starting (the current model), course structure emerges through numerous fragmented interactions. “Intelligence” is applied after the content and interactions start, not before. This is basically what Google did for the web – instead of fully defined and meta-described resources in a database, organized according to subject areas (i.e. Yahoo at the time), intelligence was applied at the point of search. Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.

Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.

Filtering can be done in explicit ways – such as selecting readings around course topics – or in less obvious ways – such as writing summary blog posts around topics. Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.

During CCK08/09, one of Stephen’s statements that resonated with many learners centers on modelling as a teaching practice: “To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and to reflect.”

Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.

Without an online identity, you can’t connect with others – to know and be known. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of have a presence in order to participate in networks. To teach well in networks – to weave a narrative of coherence with learners – requires a point of presence.

In CCK08/09, we used The Daily, the connectivism blog, elearnspace, OLDaily, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Second Life, and numerous other tools to connect with learners. Persistent presence in the learning network is needed for the teacher to amplify, curate, aggregate, and filter content and to model critical thinking and cognitive attributes that reflect the needs of a discipline.

We’re

We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment. My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality.

Aggregation had so much potential. And yet has delivered relatively little over the last decade.

Perhaps we need to spend more time in information abundant environments before we turn to aggregation as a means of making sense of the landscape.

I’d like a learning system that functions along the lines of RescueTime – actively monitoring what I’m doing – but then offers suggestions of what I should (or could) be doing additionally. Or a system that is aware of my email exchanges over the last several years and can provide relevant information based on the development of my thinking and work.

EMPLOYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN PREPARING CURRICULUM MATERIALS

These materials may include samples of contemporary mass media and popular culture as well as older media texts that provide historical or cultural context.

SHARING MEDIA LITERACY CURRICULUM MATERIALS

Educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be able to share effective examples of teaching about media and meaning with one another, including lessons and resource materials

STUDENT USE OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN THEIR OWN ACADEMIC AND CREATIVE WORK

Students include excerpts from copyrighted material in their own creative work for many purposes, including for comment and criticism, for illustration, to stimulate public discussion, or in incidental or accidental ways (for example, when they make a video capturing a scene from everyday life where copyrighted music is playing).

Because media literacy education cannot thrive unless learners themselves have the opportunity to learn about how media functions at the most practical level, educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their own classroom work. Media production can foster and deepen awareness of the constructed nature of all media, one of the key concepts of media literacy. The basis for fair use here is embedded in good pedagogy.

DEVELOPING AUDIENCES FOR STUDENT WORK

Students who are expected to behave responsibly as media creators and who are encouraged to reach other people outside the classroom with their work learn most deeply.

In some cases, widespread distribution of students’ work (via the Internet, for example) is appropriate. If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existing media content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wide audiences under the doctrine of fair use.

educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making.

The Web Community

You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."

"Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."

It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."

As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".

There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."

"We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.

Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."

Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."

In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."

So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."