Will Richardson Lecturing at Kennesaw State
Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, is speaking at our Blog2Learn workshop at Kennesaw State University.
He just said there are now 1 billion people on the web. Guess how long to get to 2 billion — answer, 2015. That means 2 billion people whose knowledge we can tap into. Now 1 trillion places to click on. The new reality is the read/write web. Has only been around for 12 years. So far mostly a read only, now it is a two way street. Now it is a more interactive space. The era of Web 2.0. There are 1.2 million posts each day. Technorati tracking. 2.5 billion links.
Now to our teachers. You are about to become a part of this grand network. You will have a community around you. This is about being social. Learning happens in a social context. “There is a place for everyone on the web.”
See Global Voices, run by Rebecca MacKinnon. You get a sense of what bloggers are saying about the world. We need a more global view of the world. Here is a way to interact with the rest of the world.
Using quotes: This is the age of engagement. Society of authorship. Era of collaboration. Age of participation.
Thomas Friedman says we are uploaders. We put stuff on there to share with the world.
Over 12 million kids are creating blogs now. But they need help.
Now listening to a Matthew Bischoff, a podcast by him as then a 13-year-old. Bischoff says I’m “podcasting from my bedroom.”
Lots of kids are out there learning to teach. Not just handing stuff into teachers. Now thousands of kids out there teaching to other folks on the Internet. We just have to help them do more of that.
Richardson shows his daughter’s book on Flickr that was posted. Now more than 900 people have read it around the world. That’s a powerful incentive.
Now showing Sandaig at Troon, a school blog in Ireland. Publishing for the world on a day-to-day basis.
Now seeing Scribe 15, It’s Not Fair, where students post notes.
Richardson says bring the idea of MySpace into the school. They are learning loads at MySpace. Over 1 million bands have space at MySpace. Lots of interesting dialogue on global warming for example. There are dangers, but more positive stuff is happening.
We don’t have to teach them content, we have to teach them skills. We have to teach them how to do this well.
Now Richardson says that the majority of kids don’t think school is relevant. We have to stop thinking of this room as our classroom. If we limit it to this room. We are failing our kids. I think the read/write web will change the world. We have to think that our kids can have a worldwide audience. We have to put our stuff out there for people to see. See what MIT Open Courseware is doing. They are giving it away. It makes their education transparent. If people see it and like it, they will come back. South African Curriculum is a wiki. Anyone can come in to.
Everything is going in a positive way, unless the government screws it up, and if lose the net nuetrality battle we will lose what we are attempting to do. Other bad laws are at work. It is not a privacy issue or a risk, if we do it well.
Back to the classrooms, this is a literacy issue, not a technology issue any more.
Think of the teacher as a DJ. You can pull together from all sorts of information. He puts together a “playlist” list of stuff he has found on Martin Luther King, for example.
You can go from one teacher to many. Go to 43 Things. Then you are connected with people who are interested in the same things you are on any topic. So you have many teachers.
Learning from sometime to anytime learning. We can learn anything on line, at any time, at any place.
Wikipedia is the poster child for collaboration. Kids are contributing. Yes, they are abusing it. One student put an idea on wikipedia for a paper, watched it get edited by others and then handed in the final product. Got in trouble, but it was innovative.
Don’t tell your kids to hand it in, tell them to publish it.
Reading is not enough anymore. Used to say just consuming the information from the textbook was enough. Now have to be more careful. Have to help them find the best information.
Easywhois.com and you can find out who owns the site. We are going from knowing what learn to knowing where to learn. Going from information literacry to network literacy.
Raises three questions:
How do teachers need to change when students can publisher to the world?
How do teachers need to change when we can bring primary sources into the classroom?
How do we define literacy when is not just enough to read and write anymore?
