What do people want?

Once again, the field of mainstream media provides practical insight into what ails education as an enterprise: "This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share."
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Next Vista for Learning

I met Rushton Hurley at EduBloggers.com He now teaches part time but the bulk of his waking moments are spent on a non-profit organization that he started called Next Vista for Learning. Here’s how Rushton explained the site:

“It is a place where there is an online library of videos by and for teachers and students. It is totally free. The idea is just to be able to say if you’ve got a great way to teaching a skill or concept share that in a video that is five minutes or less ideally using media in some engaging way that some kid who is having trouble understanding that topic could say “Oh that’s what it is.” Because it is free to them they don’t have to stop and have it explained to them. They don’t have to feel stupid. They can just go somewhere and see what has been contributed

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Long Tail Not So Long

Back to iLaw: Yochai Benkler did a presentation on “The Internet and Political Values” yesterday that was, for the most part, way over my head, but the parts that I did get were pretty enlightening. One thing that really stuck was his deconstruction of the Long Tail, where it appears that there are a few blogs that get lots of readers and many, many blogs that get just a few. In the larger view, this is true, but what’s significant is when you break it down into clusters of blogs by interest. Benkler showed that within interest groups, the distribution is pretty standard: some blogs have a lot of readers, most blogs have a fair number (in relative terms) and some have very few. His point, I think, was that as the blogosphere grows larger, there will still be great opportunity for new bloggers to become significant contributors within their interest groups. Think of it as a lot of mini blogospheres, similar to our growing K-12 edublogger sphere. There have been so many great new voices added to our mix over the past six months or so, and that only promises to continue.

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The Guerilla Season Book Blog-Eric Langhorst

Just a quick link to another example of how teachers can use blogs to enhance the reading of a book in class by extending conversations past the school day, linking to resources and relevant materials, inviting parents to read and study with their children, inviting students from other parts of the country to collaborate and have students learn directly from interacting with the author of the book. What a concept!
Guerrilla Season is the book, Eric Langhorst of the Speaking of History podcast is the teacher, and it appears he’s looking for more participants.

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Reel Deal Drug Education Resource Launched

The Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Lesley Hinds, officially launched the Reel Deal drug education resource at a ceremony at Transition on the 10th of March 2006. The launch is the culmination of a year of work by all of the organisations involved in the Reel Deal partnership.

The Reel Deal partnership combines the public, private and voluntary sectors bringing together Transition, an organisation which provides accredited learning and support to recovering and recovered substance users, Fast Forward, a youth drugs and alcohol peer education programme, NHS Lothian and Media Education, a specialist media company that works in the community to help promote positive change.
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Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers - Teacher as Learner

First of all, thanks to those of you from Brigham Young University who added your thoughts to my first post on the set curriculum. I enjoyed reading your comments and learning more about your concerns and questions regarding teaching 21st century learners. As you can see, this is a conversation that can continue for a long time, and I hope that it will continue this week and even after our Second Life meet-up on Monday.

Today, I want to respond to your questions about student-teacher relationship and technology. I’ve selected the following questions from the list you sent me:

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Internet Public Library Blogs

I’m not sure why, but Anne’s feed in my Bloglines account never seems to update, so every now and then I have to remind myself to check her site. (RSS has really spoiled me.) As usual, I’ve been missing some good stuff. For instance, the Internet Public Library is categorizing blogs and it looks like a good starting point for anyone just trying to get the feel for this. (In other words, it’s still a manageable list.) One pretty interesting find from that list is the list of History News Network blogs, a list I’m going to share with the Social Studies teachers.

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Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet

I just finished writing UbD units for Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the UbD Educators wiki.  As I finished writing the unit for Hamlet and saved the page, I lost half the work I had done, and I am still not sure how it happened, so I had to re-do it.  Word to the wise — when working with anything you’re doing online, save and save often.  When, oh when will I learn to do that?

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Engaging and Extending Writers

The classroom teacher of the students I have been working with on NewsQuest greeted me with great excitement yesterday. She had a folder in her hands and could not wait to share the contents. She had just received the scores for her students on this year’s writing test. Each year fifth graders in Georgia take a writing test. Students are scored and rated as emerging, developing, focusing, experimenting, engaging, or extending writers. The link above explains those categories in more detail Mrs. Mateling said her children have never done better on the writing test than this year. She kindly told me that much of the credit needs to go to me. I told her no, I was sure the weblog writing helped but she was the classroom teacher and that’s where credit is due. However, I view this as somewhat of a validation of a real focus on writing on weblogs for students. Eight of her students are in my group of 11. Five were rated as extending writers and 3 as engaging writers!

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Weblogs as Portfolios (Con?t)

(via Jeremy) Is there anyone NOT talking about collaboration these days? This essay about Weblogs as e-portfolios reiterates a lot of the collaborative potential of Weblogs in schools.

Weblogs are a great reflective tool. A student can write something about their course,
perhaps categorise it in terms of subject or the piece of work concerned, and that
reflection can be accessed and searched by both date and context.

However, weblog functionality comes into its own when mixed with social networking,
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