He noted that L;eadership does not use the technologies within school boards...at all levels. This is important to me because it became readily apparent that the plan needs to address this in order to have leadership be leading from the forefront.
You must own it before you can give it away
How does this idea enter into the development of the plan...It helps focus on the target must be sighted to make a difference.
I would like to open this blog up to various outsiders to comment on to get help from others thinking about the evolution of education in the time of the read write web. The world is changing in that members of our society no longer have to look for information... is everywhere and and in every possible format. It is imperative that we become involved in leveraging the 21st century tools to provide our students with 21st century skills to be abole to thrive within the emerging paridgm which we see as the future but in reality is just an evolutionary stage of societal change that is in reality the present.
How do the emergence of this technically enabled world with its increasingly wired inhabitants alter the needs of education. The fact is that what we percieve to be literacy is shifting, at lightening speed. The writing is on the wall collaborative, democratic interrelations between individuals and members of communities on a global scale is altering our reality. We must understand this and articulate it to our students. Because the youth are so much more comfortable within this social context we must empower them to codesign the way we come to interface with the changes all around us. The way in which we interface and make sense of the world may well be 21st century literacy. It can be much more multimedia than what has come before.
Copyright and intellectual property rights are shifting as well in this disruptive time. One man he noted in the regard was Lawrence Lessig who writes in the blogosphere in a place called Free Culture which is an entire book which can be downloaded from the web. This ebook brings to light the concepts which need to be considered
He pointed that you can go to the Creativecommons.org and place your own copyright on your own stuff and in this way share or reserve the rights of the work you have done. http://creativecommons.org/ browse around this interesting site. This discussion alone could be a very strong 21st century literacy discussion for students and a teachable moment in regards to what consitutes ethical and moral when it comes to our evloving forms of expression.
Teachers are having students create their own textbooks. RSS feeds are the way of the future and we do not even have students use them....remember what we said in the preamble to this ramble...the leaders do not use the tools. This is a real chance to captilize on the learner voice in a real and meaningful way as we feel our way along together. We saw it coming, the whole guide on the side discussion we have been having as the very hierachical Industrial Age gives way to a colloborative age. As educators we need to get our heads around the basic and powerful influences that are surging around us.Our job requires that leverage the tools like Web 2.0 but more importantly that we alter our ways of facilitating with students that empowers all of us to learn.
3 comments:
Hi Jeff,
Welcome to the Edublogosphere. I, too, started blogging after hearing Will speak about a year ago. It's hard for me to believe that I didn't even know what RSS before I heard Will and now it's an integral part of my personal learning network.
Hi David
Thanks for your response, you have provided me with my first blog post response. I read Will's book about 4 months ago and heard him speak in Nashville and again here in Toronto. I am going to try to use some parts from Will's posted speech and some of the other remarks I have listened to in the past few months to present to the other consultants at my board. I want to get them to question what it means to be literate in our rapidly evolving society.
I was wondering how you are using the RSS feeds and if you have any good onlne resource ideas to show the others about the possibilities of RSS in the classroom or as educators in the 21st century school.
"You must own it before you can give it away."
This is a powerful statement. It is something I believe more because of my own experiences with students I have interacted with at school and my own children at home. I have to confess I did not even know how to turn on a computer 10 years ago and use to believe that technology was for a certain kind of thinker. I also used to feel unsure of how much technology would be safe for my children.
But my interactions with kids have changed my whole way of thinking. I now want to try new practices before, rather than censor them.
I think I-pods are the best example of how my thinking changed once I got my own and started using it. When I-pods first started showing up in schools, I was offended by them. I was afraid kids were using them to listen to music that had offensive language and ideas that promoted violence. So there was one rule. Don't bring them. The consequence if you did, was that I would take them away. It didn't work. I could see I was loosing the battle, so I started asking the kids questions? What do you listen to? How does it work? What do you think I could use this for? The kids I talked to were engaged in this conversation. They showed me that there is some pretty offensive stuff out there. Many of them didn't listen to it. Others did and wanted to talk to someone about it. They wanted to talk to me about it. THe conversations were so powerful because I was connecting to kids in their reality and not mine.
I didn't stop there, I got an I-pod and I have a whole new understanding about its power for my own learning (I am a consumer of information.) and 21st century learning (creators of information). So this one line "we have to own it before we give it" means so much to me. I wouldn't have understood the depth of in that message even a year ago. I still have opinions about how and when to use I-pods but they are grounded in experience and not heresay.
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