This time of year, I look forward to two events. (Well, probably a few more than just these two, but for now . . .)
I’ll discuss the EduBlog Awards winners in a future post, when I have the time to further explore and enjoy them all. In this post, I want to point you to Dave Cormier’s quite brilliant reflections, a summary of the changes we’ve experienced this year in the edublosphere–10 News Events of the Edublog Year.
Dave and I chatted the other day and he convinced me that even the one point I didn’t think resonated for me truly did. And so, although they ALL really resonate, Dave, here are my favorites:
8. Burnout This year any number of people in the edubloggosphere discovered that reading 1302 blogs everyday in your bloglines account is not going to cut your grass, read the latest Harry Potter novel or take your husband out to dinner. The sale of replacement delete keys soared as people hacked and slashed their RSS readers down to a reasonable 200 blogs.
(I thought I was obsessed with keeping up with cool and effective learning ideas before this blog/2.0 thing started, now I am crazed. More than ever before, I ignore the cleaning, my beloved professional journals, the stack of books on my night table. Unlike the more advanced of my blogger pals, I have yet to abuse my own delete key. A resolution of ‘07?)
7. Learning communities This year we also discovered that we could learn together. The year was full of online conferences and new communities and new wikis that popped up to ’support people’s learning in a collaborative way’ In the words of Jennifer Maddrell… It is hard to collaborate alone.
(I love this quote and plan to exploit it at every conference and I would argue with Dave that this one should rise closer to the top. This past year completely changed the way many of us learn, speak, write, publish, attend conferences, share, and all sorts of other collaborative stuff.)
6. MMO - Second life This year professional educator research and funding type people seem to have discovered that children like to play games. Especially fun ones. Massive multiplayer online games have been all the rage… second life and world of warcraft are the latest victory for 10 year olds on the battlefield of education. I’m not sure they notice… but now those ten hours a night are educational.
(Okay, I still feel like a SL outcast and VR klutz. I can’t figure out SL time. I am still having trouble navigating and finding the right clothes and hairstyle, but I so see the potential for meeting learners and for providing library services in these new landscapes. But why does the learning curve seem so steep for me here?)
4. DOPA The government discovered that legislation to ‘protect children’ (COPA) written in 1998 just might not be current enough to deal with the fastest developing technology of our time. The solution DOPA. Planners of this legislation started off solid, recognizing that D (DOPA) comes after C (COPA) clearly making DOPA more current. The thinktank funding must have run out after their first breakthrough as their next idea was to bar students access “from commercial social networking websites and chatrooms” Mmm… stop capitalism and a 13 year old from talking in one fell swoop of the pen. Ha.
Yup, Dave. It’s impossible. And I keep wondering how the legislators are not seeing the potential and the valuable activities we are seeing in this space.
3. Google. This year we discovered that google is trying to take over my desktop. Trying to crush my desktop in fact. On last years list we predicted that the web based app was going to rule 2006, we didn’t expect them to all come from one company. Expect breakfast.google.com and ‘google university’ in 2007.
Dave, I am not as upset about this as you are. My desktop isn’t crushed. I am not married to Google, but as long as it gives me cool, useful tools and powers, we’ll keep dating. I am always open to other callers. What I worry about more is that so few folks, other than librarians, even talk about subscription stuff these days. We love the free information universe. YouTube rocks, but my subscription video services fill a great many more educational needs without the noise. And then there are all those lovely journal, ebooks, historic newspapers services. . . Bloggers don’t talk about those much and I fear (more each day) that students will assume they’re unimportant. It’s a very sweet concept that information wants to be free. Some of the best stuff may not currently be free.
2. Emancipation This year teachers everywhere discovered that they don’t need to look to their school for their edtech needs. The year was full of teachers taking the power back… of finding ways to move around the complications of funding and bureaucracy to use the free tools and free help to make our education a better place.
This is such a powerful idea, Dave, especially for schools where barriers are/were the norm. When I introduce teachers to the tools, I can see the lightbulbs. Technology is not for geeks anymore. Turf and power are shifting. When I hear them say, “but what about . . ” or “but I can’t,” I respond with “why would you even need to ask for permission.” Emancipation rocks!
1. ME! This year… yesterday in fact, Time magazine discovered that ‘I’m’ the internet. They’ve awarded this year’s ‘person of the year’ award to ME! or you! To a random person or, as the English Language lacks a clear delineation between second person singular and second person plural - to all of us. Seems the hundreds of millions of us who’ve been making websites since Al Gore made the internet are now validated.
NPR’s commentator, Bill Langworthy, posted an interesting spoof of the choice yesterday. Very cool.
In the conversation a couple of nights ago at EdTechTalk, Dave asked, “What did I miss?”
One of the participants beat me to the suggestion of another issue of the year–Creative Commons. I continue to wonder, what respect for intellectual property looks like in these changing landscapes. Are average folks paying attention to the options presented by Creative Commons? Am I the among the minority in advising my students against posting or broadcasting copyrighted (big C) art, music, video in a mix and mashup kinda world? Am I one of very few ogres forcing learners to find copyright-friendly alternatives or asking them to create their own media?
Regarding intellectual property, I see truly questionable stuff on teachers’ sites all the time. On sites I love and admire. I know lots of this stuff is not fair use. But what’s changing? How do I, how should we, respond?
And back to Dave’s list . . .
Anything missing in your mind? How would you shift the priorities?
(If you love Dave’s current list, you might also be interested in last year’s list)
