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This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.

Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).

A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.

It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable

In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.

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

He figures all of Wikipedia, his gold standard for group activity online, took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television.

Those new activities—and he gives plenty of examples in the book of projects already under way—could center on charity, civic engagement, coping with diseases, and more.

He points out that in the several decades immediately following Gutenberg's first Bible, not much really changed in European information society. Much later, some world-changing ideas came along on how to use the printing press, like the Invisible College.

"The problem with alchemy wasn't that the alchemists had failed to turn lead into gold—no one could do that. The problem, rather, was that the alchemists had failed uninformatively."

"Even when working with the same tools, they were working in a far different, and better, culture of communication."

Today's open-source software and the hypersharing of social networks represent a new, better order. And we're only starting to see the impact of those inventions.

Essentially, says Danah Boyd, a researcher for Microsoft Research and a longtime friend, Shirky thinks Karl Marx got it wrong. While critics like Slee may read any online social participation as economic exploitation, Shirky argues that people are motivated by love, not money. She points to Wikipedia: "People contribute because they enjoy the process," she says. Or academe. "Are we doing it for the pay?" "There's a lot of labor of love. People like being a part of cultural production on every level."

Shirky got the job at NYU because of a talk he gave at a technology conference in the late 1990s, while he was working as a freelance computer programmer and Web designer. T

Drawn to the classroom, he approached Yale in 1995 about teaching a class there on online social groups. Though students there backed the idea, he says, a university committee turned him down. "They killed it because they said it doesn't really make sense to talk about community online because those people aren't really meeting each other," he says.

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.

Encourage students to submit words that they had trouble with, along with a dictionary entry

Let your students share their collective information so that everyone gets a better understanding of the subject.

Make it a class project to create an FAQ for your classroom that will help new students and those that will come in years later.

Encourage students to draft rules and policies for the classroom.

Using a wiki platform, students don’t have to worry about web design, so they can focus on content instead.

Save links, documents, and quotes related to units or your classroom as a whole

Work with other teachers to create lesson plans and track students’ success.

he very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.

Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

When we lacked the ability to efficiently connect and collaborate with each other, that intrinsic motivation often didn’t surface. So we assumed that productive, public activities revolved around extrinsic motivation and external rewards. And we assumed that all rewards were substitutable for all other rewards. So I can pay you more or I can praise you or I can put a Lucite brick on your desk and it all works the same way.

When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well. Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.

Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model.