Now this is transparency. Given my recent dealings with whether or not to blog things that happen at work, I am a bit surprised to see this type of openness and cynicism coming through.

Will this make future employers less likely to hire this teacher?

Would it make you less likely to hire this teacher thinking that if something bad happens, he’s going to run to the blog?

I am not knocking him, just asking curious questions…

understanding » Day of Conflict

Technorati Tags: christophercraft, understanding,

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Some months ago I registered edublogosphere.com and installed Pligg. I was really just playing around trying to learn new software. Pligg is a Digg style CMS which allows folks to submit and vote for stories. It never got buy-in, but I never tried to support it much. I might have blogged about it before, but never gave it much thought. I figured if it took off, I would jump back in, but had little desire to push it.

There is a new someone in town doing the same thing, at www.edumio.com. Cool, have it.

Trouble is my edublogosphere.com site got ragged on last night during EdTech Weekly when they were mentioning the new site. The new site is also running on Pligg, and is using the default template. When they were talking about it, they asked if the new site had more than one person submitting stories. I’m aware the edublogosphere site isn’t doing anything, it never really was supposed to.

So I am left with a few options.

1. I recently upgraded to the new version of Pligg which has a cool RSS Importer. If I were to use it, I could theoretically add every feed from my aggregator, set up a little cron job, and have it import  every feed I can find in the edublogosphere and allow folks to vote the top stories up to the top. It’s a lot of work, but would be kind of fun to see that many feeds in one spot.

2. I can let it die and redirect the little traffic to edumio. It’s all about the cause, you know! I am all about supporting folks with similar motives and more time to do this stuff.

3. I can revamp the site and try to get buy-in. But why? I see this as the tossed-out option, just mentioned for the sake of mentioning.

So what should I do, option 1 or option 2?

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Anyone get my bad Broadway reference? Yup, Guys and Dolls.

So I started graduate school last week and it has already shaken my foundation. It’s interesting to note that it didn’t take long, and that I am not upset about it. You see, like anyone else, I entered the land of higher, higher education with certain preconceived notions about why certain things happen the way that they do. Certain things have just seemed to come intuitively since I’ve been teaching (1.5 years) and I just took them and ran.

Does that make them right?

Teaching thus far has been a lot of flying by the seat of my pants.

I didn’t go to college for education, I have a Bachelor’s in Spanish with a minor in Criminal Justice. I teach Spanish because I speak it and have mastered the second language from a learning standpoint. Does that make me qualified to teach it?

Hmmm.

I did an alternative certification program designed for folks like me with degrees in something other than education and it taught me a VERY surface knowledge of educational theory, but more time was spent on the more pressing needs; how to prevent burnout, classroom management, document document document. Little time was spent on why there is such a push for more technology. Little time, if any, was spent on research. No one could aptly defend why we do what we do from a research standpoint.

Not many folks blog about the research.

We just seem to go with what feels right, or what seems to work, or what seems to act as a salve to our fears of getting behind in this flattening world.

Are we acting out of intuition, intellect, or inspiration? Is acting out of any of these appropriate? Sometimes.

Do we need to stop and spend some time figuring out whether or not what we’re doing is having any real, quantifiable effect?

Yup.

That’s the hard part, though. It doesn’t terribly interest me to spend time studying kids that have spent a year blogging and those that have their work posted up merely around the classroom to determine whether that change has any effect on anything other that the ellusive-yet-unconvincing “engagement”.

And if we do evaluate them, on what basis do we so such? High stakes testing? Isn’t that falling back into the trap of the “old school” pedagogy?

I have heard a series of quotes lately that begin with “It’s not about the technology” and end with “It’s about the ___”.

I probably should cite these, but I am pretty sure Warlick says it’s about the information (yup) (read this comment, too) and Lehman says it’s about the pedagogy (not in the words I’ve used, but close), and Clarence Fisher has weighed in, too. A quick Google search reveals that other folks have their own ideas, such as…

It’s not about the technology, it’s about…

• the people
• the individual
• the business
• the community (Jimmy Wales via Mitch Kapor via Andy Carvin)
• the changing human experience
• what the technology can do for you
• behavior (Christine Borgman)
• the interaction
• the human aspect
• the connection
• the student
• how businesses operate and the global economy (O’Reilly ONJava Blog)
• the content

So what is it about, then? Is the answer relative? Can it be about one thing for me and another for you? I bring all this up because my professor said (and I am going to ask him to read this for accountability purposes!)…

It’s not about the technology, it’s about the design principles.

Mind you, this is in a class entitled, Design and Evaluation of Academic Games and Simulations.

We talked about the fact that technology is not universally motivating, a concept that for some reason I never quite realized. You see, I am quite motivated by technology, and I wrongly assume everyone is. I need to look no further than my mother (who will not read this, lamentably) to see this proven.

He also said that technology must be in service to the cognitive processes. All that to bring us to the final question,

Why isn’t more research being cited in the edublogosphere to support the bandwagons we all seem to be lunging for?

Where is the research that lends scientific evidence to the claim that blogging is better than writing on paper? I am not saying I disagree, but where is the objective data? This is but one example?

If there were research, would I be able to determine whether it was valid or not? Was there selection bias during the research candidate selection process? Does the research identify the under girding principles that are guiding the instructional practices? Or are we operating out of our intuition that something is wrong, and this feels like a good solution.

Have we really identified the problem?

I certainly do not claim to have any answers. Truth is, I used to have a strong preference towards reading authors that were deceased.

Dead.

They can’t change their minds. If they’ve written something when they were nearing the end of life, better, because they have had at least lots and lots of anecdotal evidence.

They’ve tried and seen what has worked and not worked.

Please understand this posting is more for me to explore my thoughts and shake my foundation. I am just beginning the journey of teaching and plan to continue in this field for many years, and the more time I spend laying a solid foundation the better.

Maybe I need to take a step back, spend a little more time evaluating why I am doing what I am doing.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I need to do. If I can articulate the why, and show the results, well, isn’t that what we should be shooting for? But how do you define the results?

Uh oh, there’s that vicious cycle starting again…I’d better hit publish before I come full circle.

Thanks for sticking with me through this. Graduate school is certainly going to prove to be the kiln that bakes my teaching into pottery, hopefully it comes out with a stamp, dokimos.

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I claim to be no web designer. I can still code some mean HTML but have never been able to manipulate graphics to my liking, no matter how open source the program is. So when I sat out to throw together a custom front page for the NextGenTeachers, I offered to code it, as long as someone else designed it. Little did I know I was in for a shock.

You see, I have not designed a website that I intended to get a decent amount of traffic in some time. Oh sure, I redesigned two sites in the last few months, but those were using templates from open source web design and was fairly easy using Kompozer.

Now that I am working on a site for NextGenTeachers, with some awesome design work by Doug Belshaw, I am left wondering how to proceed. We’ve got a solid set of icons and graphics, but it’s on a plain white background. This doesn’t seem terribly web 2.0ish.

I have to admit, I am absolutely captivated by web 2.0 design, and there is one web site in particular that makes me want to shake the hand of the designer. I have contacted the gentleman who runs the site for an interview for this blog regarding his site and use of open source software in the build. It is built using Ruby on Rails, and I understand he learned Ruby for this site.

Impressive.

More impressive is the design. It is simplistic, clean, and wonderful. It has an automatically updating rss feed which is based a javascript (that I really should search for, I see it in the source code).

The catalyst for this series of design-based changes in my thinking was an article I read that really resonated with me. It talks about how years ago us geeks all went the exact opposite direction from Arial, and now it’s making quite a comeback. The article deals with many of the characteristics of web 2.0 design, or at least characteristics that we have come to associate with web 2.0 sites. I can’t necessarily articulate them, but I feel like I know then when I see them.

I recognize that web 2.0 is about information and collaboration, not web design elements. As a matter of fact, I have a post I’ve been working on for some time called “Does Web 2.0 equal Ajax?”. I get that. O’Reilly defines it well. I will make no attempt to even summarize it. All I know is I am hunting for a web 2.0′erizer. I want to take these icons, put them in a blender, and have it spit out the design.

I want to focus on the content, maybe hack it a little.

I am horrible at creating graphics with rounded edges, big fonts, pastel colors, and the like. Maybe plain is ok? Doesn’t content rule anyway?

And no, don’t worry, there’s no flash in sight. Yeesh.

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Ok, I am thinking out loud here.

If this is going to work, why can’t it work easily? Is it really necessary to have all the discussion and back and forth we’ve had? Can’t we just put out a call for young teachers to come together and talk about what we’re doing in the hopes of connecting people?

I see us reaching two distinct groups, 1) the international crowd, both Americans teaching internationally and non-American teachers both here and abroad and 2) new and preservice teachers.

I think this manifests as an audiocast where a few of the folks in the network come together and talk about what we’re up to.

We have also talked about a team blog, and I am leaning towards one that aggregates automatically from our existing blogs (provided the url is already entered into the team blog and it matches a predetermined category) to provide a central place for discussion about the next generation of teaching and learning.

Brought down to this basic level, is it really all that bad? There really is (nor ever was) a formal membership, outside of the loose-knit chit-chatting we’ve done so far, and we would not exclude anyone from the conversation in the form of comments and audiocast participation. The team blog would consist of folks that are a part of the organizing of this network, what Downes calls the community of practice. Would we include folks in the team blog that were over 40? I dunno. Haven’t thought about it yet. Truth is, all the folks I’ve been talking to and hashing this out with happen to be around 30. Is that intentional? No, but I do not think it is coincidence that it happened that way.

Are we promoting divisiveness? I don’t believe so. I think we’re just a bunch of folks eager to share the amazing things going on in this crop of new and young teachers. At least, that’s my heart in this.

I spent a lot of time vision casting this months ago, and it is not wasted time, but it looks to me like that falls under the unity category of groups, which appears to be inconsistent with where we’re headed. I have articulated common values previously, and that will be the binding force.

I am hoping once the other folks get back from vacation in other countries they will chime in.

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It seems like a lot of the concern regarding the NextGenTeachers idea is about a misconception that we are forming an exclusive group. Allow me to articulate our thinking in more appropriate vocabulary. I am heavily echoing Stephen Downes here, you can watch a video of his thoughts on this matter on Google Video.

We are forming a network with the goal of connecting people in ways that will maximize openness and as a result we will have deeper conversations and result in new perspectives. In a sense, we are looking at a new network topography.

This change in topography is in essence a new configuration of the network that will yield insights that were not possible by using the edublogosphere as it exists today. This is predicated on the idea that collaboration yields different data than would result in individual “work”.

How does this manifest?

I think the first quality we must posess is diversity. Downes speaks to a salad bowl, and if you consider the international nature of our group, diversity is a given.

We are also autonomous, insofar as we have articulated and thought-out values and guiding principles. They are certainly organic and subject to change, and that is in fact one of our ideals.

We are an open group. While we speak to our being young, our goal is to bring educators together to form a personal learning network of all ages. Cathy, a library media specialist has offered to mentor. Can you imagine if our outreach to universities brought an emerging LMS and Cathy together? Not to mention bringing this hypothetical graduate into the conversation as a participative voice? That is the goal. Openness, especially as it relates to context and identity. Part of our identity has to be our openness.

We are connected. We are users of aggregators, Skype, audiocasting, webcasting, and various other forms of communication. The fact that we are so widespread internationally and we have communicated so much already speaks to our commitment to communication.

We are distributed. This can be demonstrated based on our different passions. We belive that out of a sense of the connective, knowledge emerges.

If you watch Stephen’s video, as linked above, you will see that I took this line by line. I did so because this has been a guiding principle for us all along. Our goal was never the traditional “stars and gurus” approach. Truth is, I claim to know very little. I only claim to be on this journey, too. I did articulate a mission statement, or a vision, but only because I was trying to spell it out for the reader, not because I ask folks involved in this to ascribe to it.

I will follow up with more thoughts, and I am curious to see if this helps clear things up a bit.

As always, I only ask that in all of this, you hear my heart.

UPDATE: Here is the graphic I have been using as reference. Used by permission of Mr. Downes, although his work is released under Creative Commons, so permission was requested because it is a screenshot of a video presentation.

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Well the cat is out of the bag. Note, if you’re going to read this post, read it carefully before responding. Hear my heart…
This announcement is NOT ready for prime time, but now is needed because we are being challenged over something that exists very much in theory alone. You could say this is an alpha release, but I feel this is needed because on the comments to Bud’s posting we have been referred to as narrow and divisive. That is not our desire nor our approach. I am so sorry to have to announce this under these circumstances, as this was going to be such an exciting announcement, now it feels more like damage control.

What I am announcing today is the creation of a group of educators whose mission can be articulated as follows:

Next Generation Teachers is a global network of educators
sharing thoughts around the tools of today and the students of tomorrow.

Here is the backstory, please hear my heart in this…

Some months ago, I got into several conversations with a couple recent graduates of anytown USA higher education teacher training programs. They were left feeling dissatisfied with the amount of instruction they had received regarding technology and its use in k12 education. Is it the purpose of higher ed to teach this? I don’t know. Let’s set that aside.

So we talked about blogging, podcasting, wikis, tagging and the like. Our conversation took us to Moodle and beyond. But more than that, it occurred to me that there might be a need to connect graduates of teacher-training programs to the world of educational technology that we experience every day in our aggregators. I want these folks to know of the wealth of resources out there in the form of amazing teachers, authors, consultants, speakers, and the like that can influence the future of education.

I want them to know there is another way.

I don’t want anyone to fall into the trap of thinking education has to be done the same way it always has been. I want them to rage against the system, for the sake of our kids.

I did not attend a formal higher education teacher-training program rather I went through an alternative route that allowed me to teach while taking state board of ed classes on the weekends and during the summer. I noticed that there, too, was a lack of instruction of how to use these amazing new tools to help revolutionize the classroom. Much was taught about how it was always done. Now, there is wisdom there, but there is also room for change.

I want these career-changers to see there is another way.

This leads me to Purpose # 1 of the NextGenTeachers - to connect preservice and new educators to the edtechblogosphere. This is to be accomplished through direct outreach to campuses, flyers, posters, and other strategies. To reach them, and then connect them. NextGenTeachers is not about bringing them into our fold, rather to function as a gateway.

Purpose # 2 deals with the International nature of our group. I will not list the members, because I do not have their consent to do so yet (again, this is much earlier than intended) but suffice it to say that we are scattered around the globe. That is part of the plan! We believe that this world is flattening and that international collaboration is going to be a large part of the future need of our students.

I was a Christian missionary to Peru for some time, and during my research of different missionary agencies I noticed that one major area of work for these agencies was caring for the missionaries. Be it a phone call home, a care package, or pastoral counsel on the ground, caring for people’s hearts was important. Well, NextGenTeachers wants to unite the international teachers out there to bring them into the conversation. Much (the majority?) of the innovation in the EdTech world is coming from the United States and we want to help spread the knowledge to other countries. This outreach will be to Americans teaching internationally, as well as to native teachers in other countries. I suppose I could sum it up by saying,

Purpose # 2 is to connect international teachers to the wealth of wisdom and resources and ensure their voices are heard. Playing with words at one point a few weeks ago I jotted down that “Global collaboration will be a part of many of our students’ careers, the corporate world is not the first place they should experience it.”

Here is more of our thought process. This would have been better worked out, but due to the circumstances, you get the raw idea.

How do we accomplish these goals?

In the interest of transparency, I had a long chat with Dave Cormier about possibly bringing this under the Worldbridges umbrella. That’s in the thought process. I am not sure what they are thinking, and I sure don’t know what we think. It’s just an idea.

One idea would be to sort of follow in the footsteps of the Women of Web 2. Weekly show, etc.

I don’t want to copy them.

I wish I had a better idea of how to accomplish this goal, but as of yet, everything we have talked about has been remarkably familiar to the women of web 2’s ideas. I feel like we’re on the cusp of coming up with new ideas to really get a new thing going, but I am not sure.

Let me address some of the more notable objections.

1. Is another group really necessary? This seems to be Bud’s central objection. Let me iterate that our goal was never to be divisive, and I am a little upset that his commenters would assume that we were without even knowing who I am. I hope my heart comes through on this blog, and I am not one to create walls. I just feel like there are some “natives” out here doing some amazing things! I think it would be a lot of fun for some of us younger teachers to get together and highlight some of the wonderful ideas coming from the next generation.

Our mean age is less than 30, which means we have a lot of teaching years left.

I am not saying we are experts, all I am saying is that this is an amazing group of teachers (and I speak of them, not me) and I want to show the world what they are doing! More than that, I want to show preservice and new teachers that there are some other younger teachers out there doing great stuff.

2. Objection #2 is that creating more groups is divisive and not unifying. I really don’t have a response to this as our group is not intending to draw from the already-there audience. I know this is poorly articulated, but we are intending to serve and draw from a group of folks that is not currently a part of the conversation.

I guess I see our group as having open arms, with one arm extended to the international community specifically, and the other arm reaching towards the preservice/new teachers and bringing them into the conversation, not monopolizing them.

That is Purpose #3, to bring more folks involved in education into the conversation. I don’t see that as wrong or divisive. We are not trying to keep anyone out, rather we are trying to reach the technologically lost and help them understand that it is about the information, not the integration. We want to help them not fall into the trap of setting a yearly goal to integrate more technology and simply automate the already existing process.

We want to spread the revolution.

It is not our revolution, but it is our generation.

A lot of this is rambling, and believe me, this is not how I wanted to announce this. Please hear the cry of my heart to help save more kids from the same old same old. I don’t think the current system can last much longer, and I think that because we are as young as we are, we will be around to see this thing through, for better or for worse.

Also please understand this is still just a theory. The web site that Bud linked to is horrible, and was just for my personal testing. Bud and I had talked about this idea since I am still in a counsel-seeking mode. For the record, I sent emails to some of the major players in the edublogosphere seeking counsel on this, to see if was even a good idea.

I recieved only one response, from Bud Hunt. Just one. I know these folks are busy, I mean it was getting to be Christmastime (I emailed in November).
What I do know is that I have a group of folks excited about helping out! I don’t think we are egotistical in trying to do this, our goal is not to further ourselves. I hope you can hear my heart here.

One final note, we as a group CRAVE accountability. Hence the discussion with Dave Cormier. If there were a major player out there willing to become our “club sponsor” we would ceratainly entertain that. We want to function with complete integrity and not make rookie mistakes. There is much wisdom in much counsel. Hence my many requests for help!

I know I don’t know much, and I would love (and need) some oversight.

Ok, let me have it. I take full responsibility for this group of folks, it was my idea and I will take the heat.

Does this have wings?

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Ignore this post. I am working on a theory for aggregation by category instead of tag. You may recall I have been working on this.

Here’s praying (really) that it works!

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