Web 2.0 and 23 Things in Action!

Bridge Infrastructure
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

While completing Thing #6, I ran across The Rachel Maddow Show's Photostream on Flickr where they have show and user content posted and I blogged on an motivational poster created in Automotivator.

Also on the Photostream was an invitation to submit your own posters. I submitted this one in which I used a photo available for non-commercial use and remix under the Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, I went to check out the site and found that my poster was one of 14 posted on a new page on MSNBC.com called Maddow Fans Get Motivated. Check it out!

You, and you, and you got to give them hope.

The morning after the Oscars and Sean Penn's win for his seamless portrayal of Harvey Milk, it does well to remember the voice and words of the real man.

Hope helps us keep a grip on our teaspoons.

Thing #10, If you don't like Change, you're going to like Irrelevance even less

 Personally, I like Image Chef. 

Thing #9, Week #4: New Found Classroom Blogs

Here's a look at some new and not so new blogs that I dug up on Technorati and a few other places.

• Throughlines -- When I first started reading this blog the author, Bruce Shauble, was chair of the English Dept. at Punahou School in Honolulu. I stopped reading for a while and when I returned I found he is now the Director of Instruction. He's a teacher, artist, photographer and an incredibly thought provoking writer. Well worth reading.


• The Thinking Stick -- This blog by Jeff Utrect from the International School in Bangkok has an abundance of great info about educational technology, curricular design and 21st Century skills.


• Education.Change.Org -- Part of the larger Change.Org site, this group blog features lead blogger Clay Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator and humanities teacher who is passionate about 21st Century school reform.


• Practical Theory -- Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy,  an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st century learning that opened its doors in 2006 in Philadelphia. Very exciting things are happening there including the most recent EduCon Conference.

Thing #8 Week #4: RSS

Oh, the goodness of Google Reader. Reader is just one of the many good Google things that have captured my heart, but it is undoubtably the one that I use the most often. (Even now that I am blogging regularly on Blogger.)

As I mentioned when I was discussing my blogroll (which is simply a select slice of my Google Reader imported into Blogger), I follow about 20 blogs on a semi-regular basis. That was before I started following everyone's blog from 23 things. Now my RSS feed count is up to about 90.

Google Reader lets you organize your feeds into folders so I have folders for 23 things, Fun & Family, Education, Technology and Politics.

Fun & Family includes blogs of friends, ParentHacks, MSU Football Scores and Giants Scores. Sports scores are available for most pro and college teams at Totally Scored, but their site seems to be down right now. The sports scores RSS feeds are great ways to make sure that the info I want comes to me. 

Actually that's true for all of my feeds. Google Reader also has the option to either view all articles, all new articles, all of each post or just the headlines which can be expanded. I prefer to see just the headlines and only new posts, which lets me scan and read selectively. 

Also since some of the feeds like ThinkProgress have 15-20 posts per day, I love the option that allows me to "Mark all as read" when I occasionally get behind on keeping up with the news. I can read a few headlines and then just move along. That's the semi-regular part.

Google Reader interface for creating a shared/public version of your feed reader is a little clunky. It doesn't really have the look and feel of Google Reader, but you can see posts from some of the feeds I follow. 

Take a look here: http://tinyurl.com/cvuqn2

BYOS and Students Authoring Their Own Learning, or what Stephen Sondheim, Joss Whedon and You have in Common

Last week I had a delightful talk with Angela Demmel about the difference between watching ballet and modern dance in terms of the amount of information and text you get to help you bring meaning to the art you are seeing. One gives you a complete narrative; the other expects you to construct your meaning with only 3 or 4 lines of text to point you in the right direction.

Then while completing a series of classroom walkthroughs, I had the pleasure of watching one of Cheryl Steeb's classes in which she posed the questions, "Is the organization of this essay arbitrary? Is anything a writer decides arbitrary?"

Over the weekend, I heard a great interview with Joss Whedon who recounted a conversation he had with Stephen Sondheim about the experience of finding audiences who see more than they intended or ever saw in their own work.

Whedon spoke eloquently to the point that the difference between craft and art was the difference between creating a work which attempts to embody something for everyone and creating a very specific and individual work to which everyone will bring their own experience and subtext. He told an amusing story of upbraiding some fans who claimed to have found some subtext that he did not believe existed in his work. After he accepted an invitation to visit their website and saw their deconstruction of the episodes in question, he issued an apology to them for discounting their analysis. He said that was when he started believing in BYOS or Bring Your Own Subtext.

So I started to think about how that applies in our classrooms. No matter what we think we are presenting in the class, and no matter how clear we think the "obvious" conclusions are, we always have to leave room for the students who bring their own subtext to our work.

When discussing curriculum design and classroom planning, we often speak about the need make our classrooms student centered. What can be easy to forget is that, regardless of where the locus of control in an assignment is, from the student's point of view it is always student-centered. They are always the author of their own learning, but one of the things we have control over is how easy or difficult we make it for them to bring their own subtext, bring their own experiences to the center of the curriculum.

Another way to think about this is the difference between a classroom in which learning is the central focus vs. one in which teaching is the central focus. How challenging is it for us as teachers to let go of our desire to always fill the void with our teaching, when sometimes it is more effective to let the students fill the void with their learning? Well, very challenging, of course.

I'm not saying that teachers are control freaks, but I have heard more than one of my colleagues admit that one of the reasons they became teachers was so that they could write on the blackboard. How disappointing then to arrive in the 21st century where the boards aren't even black anymore and students get to be the center of attention.

But I am encouraged as I do the classroom walkthroughs and I see teachers edging toward the turning over of the center to the students. I am heartened as I watch all of us doing the 23 things and making public our status as learners as well as teachers. And I am proud of us.

Thing #7, Week #3: The Kindness of Strangers, Community and the Internet

Yesterday I was the beneficiary of a kindness from a stranger. As I was walking up the path to school at 7:58, the driver of a truck pulled into the front drop-off circle, rolled down his window and called out to me that I had left my lights on. Then he drove around the circle and exited back out to Mission Blvd. I had been parked facing Mission; he must have noticed my lights, seen where I was walking and stopped to help me avoid a AAA call later that afternoon for a dead battery. 

Nice. 

We don't always get to see such evidence of random acts of kindness in our daily lives, but I have been ruminating on one of my favorite things about technology that lets me see many more instances of the kindness of strangers impacting my life. 

Connections. It's all about the connections. And community. 

Sometimes it's intentional communities centered around a common interest. Sometimes it's accidental or casual or even anonymous. 

For example, I belong to an online community that has been amazingly supportive and helpful to me in the last couple of years that is full of women who I am likely to never see in person. They are scattered across the US and Europe (Minneapolis, Austin, Oregon, Provincetown, Savannah, Amsterdam, Berkeley -- okay, I see the one in Berkeley all the time) and yet they reach out to me when I need advice, support or just checking up on. 

But I also rely on the generous nature of literally millions of people about whom I will never know the slightest thing except that they post information on the internet. Often, I'm just looking for an answer to question that has piqued my interest. (Who was Belle Barth? When did Edwin Booth die?) Thank goodness for Wikipedia and all the people who make it work!

And I think I must sit down at our kitchen computer at least 4 or 5 times a week to look up a recipe. My family reaps the benefit of cooks far better than I who have taken the time to post their favorite recipes. And I love that I can compare 4 or 5 or 12 different variations to come up with something that will fit my family's taste and pantry.

Recently it got more personal as I attempted to recreate my mother's version of my paternal grandmother's Portuguese Beans (not the Hawaiian variety). I lost the recipe years ago and recently began craving them. I started out with recipe sites and Google searchs, augmented that with consultation with real live Portagees like Bernie Puccini, and am getting closer every batch. 

My favorite of the recipes I found was on a webpage with a brief explanation of how the writer's mother always kept a pot on the back burner of the stove for his dad. It was sweet and personal and his recipe was very close to my mother/grandmother's recipe. I'm grateful to him for posting it. 

The good news is I'm now making the beans weekly, until I feel like I get it right, and my daughter loves them. So thanks to the generosity of strangers, one of my family traditions gets to live a little longer.

P.S. Here's a link to a paper at the Pew Research Group from 2007 about the way community is changing online, Communities, Learning and the Internet. Among the interesting points made, 84% of internet users belong to some kind of online community and those communities are varied, socially meaningful, and rely on their members to filter and assess information for their groups.  Hmm.

Change: New Technologies for Old

I love most of what I see at the Heretik, but I really hummed when I saw this one.
When Chicken Little Blogs

It punches a ticket for my mind on several trains of thought.

• It makes me think of Marek Breiger.
  
• It reminds me a recent post on Will Richardson's blog about how new technologies are never as good as old technologies when they start, but soon eclipse them, so if you don't take the plunge with the new at the expensive of some temporary inefficiencies you will be left behind.
  
• It reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube videos, Introducing the Book.
• It makes me smile.
  

Thing #6, Week #3: Infrastructure! and my Wii Badge

Infrastructure!
Originally uploaded by The Rachel Maddow Show

This is an image that I saw tonight on the Rachel Maddow show. It was submitted to Rachel's Photostream on Flickr. I didn't know if you could blog off of someone else's photostream, but I just went ahead and gave it a try and here we are. Susan assures me that this is OK in terms of copyright issues as long as the image links back to the public photostream.

This image was made with a 3rd party app called automotivator that lets you create motivational posters, or pointed sarcastic posters, whichever you prefer.

wii pass
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

This very cool Wii Pass was made with Badge Maker which is one of fd's Flickr Toys. There are lots of other great tools/toys you can use with Flickr on this site,, including a Warholizer, a Hockneyizer and another version of the motivational poster tool.

Even though this badge is extremely slick, it will probably be of no use whatsoever in getting my son to let me play on our Wii without him.

Thing #5, Week #3: Teaspoons, Flickr, Making Change

Teaspoons
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

So I have had a flickr account for the longest time but I have never used the link to my blog or taken advantage of the email to blog feature before. That was the challenge that I set for myself for this Thing #5, Week #3.

"Why teaspoons?," you may ask. Well, I have been keeping my eyes open for the last few days trying to find something to photograph with my iPhone that I could send directly to my blog via Flickr. Tonight while I was cleaning the kitchen, the teaspoons caught my eye and connected with a train of thought and I grabbed my phone and started snapping. Then I emailed it here via my blog link with Flickr.

I have been very frustrated with the 2 steps forward, 1 step back progress of the Obama administration and tonight I started to think about the words of another ground breaking African American, Florynce Kennedy who was a real live radical feminist back in the 70's and who said "Just by nobody doing nothing the old BS mountain just grows and grows. Chocolate-covered, of course. We must take our little teaspoons and get to work. We can't wait for shovels."

It is terribly frustrating to try to move a mountain with teaspoons (or empty an ocean with teaspoons as the feminist blogger Melissa McEwan aka Shakespeare's Sister writes about), but the work must be done and if all we have are teaspoons we can't just sit around and whine about how we don't have shovels. If the political process is impaired, it is still a way in which we can make change. Even if it is one teaspoon at a time.

Making changes in our classrooms and schools also sometimes feels like teaspoon work; it only happens little by little. But we have to keep moving the teaspoons. Some folks have voiced skepticism about how many teachers and staffers who have been enticed to try the 23 Things by the jeans incentive will fall by the wayside or will only employ skills they already have. Skeptics may be right that not all of us will exit this learning experiment with new skills in the double digits, but if some slice of our group takes just one new skill or one new classroom application away from these weeks, then we will have moved some of that school change mountain over just a little bit.