Will Richardson - On-line communities: Blogs, wikis and other cool tools

Here I am in the Alan November conference - 5 hours with Will Richardson. Lucky me. I'm jealous - he has an iTrip on his iPod so this session or parts of it may be available later. When is the one for the video iPod going to be ready? - -

I am now writing on July 25 - going over my notes and polishing what's here. AND I now have my new mic for my video iPod! Will took us on a whirlwind tour of a variety of apps. Schools have to change to meet the needs and learning styles of today's students.

Educators need a context for the use of the tools -
Will do Blogs, wikis, RSS, other cool tools
You can find a lot of information at Will's wiki http://webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com/

This is a changing world.
- imagination - how can we think about how to use the technology?
Kyle of One Red Paper Clip - used his imagination to connect with the world and traded up to his house.
Animé video and other audio - and create mashups - and publish

Can share in ways we haven't before.
Over 1 billion people connected to the web - in 9 more years there will be 2 billion. There are 1 trillion links
Used to just consume information and now can create and contribute our own ideas and thoughts.

"We are at a turning point in the technology industry and perhaps even in the history of the world " Tim O'Reilly
Technorati - good search tool for blogs and does research on the blogosphere.
Now we are linking ideas, conversations, and people. Blogging can be a powerful learning experience for kids.

"society of Authorship"
an active and participatory web

Read Free Culture - Lawrence Lessig - available free online
Mentioned Creative Commons

25 million kids creating content online
Kids are tapping into the technology easily
Matthew Bischoff - podcasting in November 2004 (only 2 months after podcasting started) - at 13 he was a teacher - who was teaching to an audience.
Will's daughter made a weather book. Will scanned it and put it up on Flickr - she can see the number of readers (over 1000 already).
Sandaig School website all done by kids
The way to learn something is to teach it - these students are teaching others.

We can connect to things much more powerful outside our classrooms. Need to change classrooms
MIT Opencourseware - you can take over 600 courses free
The entire South African Curriculum is on a wiki which is part of a larger project - wikibooks
It's an organic text which is evloving (and hopefully geting better) Over 1000 books are in development

Rip, Mix and Learn environment
The Web changes teaching - teacher as connector
"Teacher as DJ"
H20 - playlists - can pull in the most relevant resources as needed.
Skype - a classroom gave classroom presentations while their parents were Skyped in.

How can we re-envision teaching?
Learn Anything Anywhere Anytime
"ubiquitiously connected and pervasively proximate" (Mark Federman)

From just in case learning to just in time learning (in case you need to know this)
Nomadic learning - self-motivated
"Learning networks based on meaning not proximity" - Stephen Downes

So many ways of sharing
Digg ( from the site: Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you!)
del.icio.us social bookmarking
Flickr photo sharing

From Hand it in to publish it - changes fundamentally what we ask kids to do.
What needs to change for students to publish to larger audiences.

We need to teach kids to read in hypertext environments
Small Pieces Loosely Joined - David Weinberger

Literacy is Editing

JumpCut - can edit movies through a web browser can then send it out

Thinkfree online office
Google spreadsheets
More and more the web is becoming an application

MySpace would be the 12th most populated country in the world
We are up in arms about how youth are using MySpace, but they are only following

Rupert Murdock owns MySpace and plans to make it the biggest advertising - need to use it to teach about media literacy Students need to learn how to be functional about social environments. We have to teach our kids. We need to know MySpace. We need to get in there to understand it.

Change is inconvenient - Al Gore
But change is coming.....

US - School 2.0

but - we take the tools they use out of their hands - schools are looking less and less about the real world
Chris Lehman

Technorati Tags: BLC06, web2.0