Techlearning blog

I have embedded what I consider to be the most powerful YouTube video to come along in the past year. I'm not going to expound upon what it is or how it changes the world. The message stands on its own.

"The medium is the message." Marshall McLuhan.

I am curious and cognisant that, for a great many of those educators reading this post, YouTube is blocked because of a) content concerns or b) bandwidth limitations in your schools. We have crippled the medium before we considered the message.

Go home and watch it.

Posted by John Pederson at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently wrapped up grant season in my world. I needed to cleanse the bad karma created by overusing "21st century skills" to get my point across on paper. I found the perfect cure.

Marcia Aas is a Library Media Specialist in one of my schools. A while back we were talking about the generational differences in technology use, i.e. "digital immigrants vs. natives", and she began telling me about her son. Marcia had that "mother talking about what her son does" sort of tone. Extremely proud with a slight scent of confused. "He works on the Macintosh version of Firefox. Next time he's in town you'll have to visit."

Josh came to town today. Marcia bribed her school administrators to free up a few classes of middle and high school students to listen for an hour of what "21st century skills" actually looks like. I got the chance to be the interviewer/moderator. It was the most powerful way of cleansing the karma of grant buzzword bingo that has plagued my last two weeks.

"Software Engineer for Firefox" admittedly skews extreme when describing what the world of work is like for those in their 20's today. Nonetheless, it's a great story about how modern day successful companies work.

Josh is exceptional. He continually reiterated two points. "Be curious." Find out why and how things work. With the Internet there are infinite resources available to answer any question. "Math." The answer doesn't matter. The process does. "If you can do math, you can figure out anything." We saw snippets of Firefox code that looked like a cross between poetry and math.

Firefox is exceptional. The browser many of us know and use has a great story behind it. Mozilla, the parent organization of the project, has somewhere in the ballpark of 150 paid employees. The mission is simple. Advance the Internet. It's the most successful "open" software projects today. A small group of employees and a community of 20,000 volunteers all working on a project that's owned by everybody.

It's a different style of work. Josh lives in Philadelphia and works out of the San Francisco offices. The typical day involves hopping in a chat room around 9:00 am. Meetings occur mid-day when time zones are less of an issue. Development never stops, it's simply passed around the world in a continuous loop. Nobody is punching a clock. Josh spends a week each month in San Francisco at Mozilla's offices. Lunches, dinners, and all you can eat snacks are available. There's a theatre stocked with movies, a game room with all the popular console games, and comfy chairs. Play hard, work hard. The organization works equally hard keeping good employees as they do finding them.

21st century skills in a 21st century workplace. I'm done using those terms. It's 2008. I'll just call it Josh. Take some time to find a few real examples in your own community of what it means to be successful today.

Posted by John Pederson at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One evening back in December 2005, three guys gathered in Stillwater, MN. Will Richardson was visiting family in the area and gave Tim Wilson and I a shout to join for dinner. The infamous angst factor was deep and strung itself throughout our conversations. Tim's instructional technology position had just been eliminated from their upcoming budget. Will was writing a book and in deep reflection about leaving his school. I had recently quit my educational technology position.

"What are you going to do? Are we nuts?"

Will finished his book and went on tour.
Tim got the great job he had been looking for.
I bought a copy of World of Warcraft, went into seclusion, and spent the next eight months stabbing wolves, slaying demons, and figuring out first-hand what this "gamer disposition" was all about.

I've spent 131 days, 21 hours, 56 minutes "in game" between then and today. Early on I joined a guild named "We Know". Guild is defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as "a medieval association of craftsmen or merchants, often having considerable power", and "an association of people for mutual aid or the pursuit of a common goal". The experience of being part of this vibrant, online community is well worth the completely insane amount of my life I have invested.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Trying to answer "why" is much like introducing a colleague to blogging or Twitter.

I recently came across a piece in the Harvard Business Review by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas titled The Gamer Disposition. They do an incredibly simple layout of five attributes that gamers bring into these worlds and that these worlds reinforce.

1. They are bottom-line oriented.
2. They understand the power of diversity.
3. They thrive of change.
4. They see learning as fun.
5. They marinate on the "edge."

"Together, these five attributes make for employees who are flexible, resourceful, improvisational, eager for a quest, believers in meritocracy, and foes of bureaucracy. If your organization is receptive to these traits (and it should be), look for gamers and the disposition they will bring you."

Click through for the rest of the "conversation starter". It likely goes a long way towards describing those characteristics about your own "play" in this "networked learning" sphere that you struggle to put your finger on.

Posted by John Pederson at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Image courtesy Hugh MacLeod at http://www.gapingvoid.com.

As we turn the corner and approach the end of another school year, I'm amazed by the amount of "underground" chatter in the network involving educators working together to land new positions for the 2008-2009 school year.

The market for talent in the education world has changed. A few short years ago it was a) educator looks in newspaper or b) administrator posts open position in newspaper. A simple quote from Jeff Jarvis at the Buzz Machine, "...the internet is unforgiving of needs to preserve old models and methods. It disaggregates ruthlessly."

Simple self-reflection. If you are seeking, what are you doing to make yourself clickable? If you are hiring, what are you doing to discover new talent?

Posted by John Pederson at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I frequently channel marketer Hugh MacLeod to provide different perspective to my educational thinking.

1. First we had Human Capital. You! There! Go to the next village and kill everybody because I’m the Chief of this village and I say so etc. 2. Then came Physical Capital. Land, property, factories etc. 3. Then came Financial Capital. Money, credit, dollars etc. 4. Then came Intellectual Capital. Our widgets are better than your widgets because our engineers are smarter than your engineers etc. 5. Then came Emotional Capital. People love our product more than they love our competitor’s product etc.

So naturally, I’m thinking, “What next?” Perhaps…

6. Expressive Capital. Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor’s products.

Originally published in 2005. Before ISTE added creativity, before we found A Whole New Mind, before we discovered Ken Robinson on TED Talks.

Where is our attention focused? Intellectual? Emotional? Expressive?

Posted by John Pederson at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Change has a grip on our attention. Some folks are working on changing Washington. A bunch of us recently gathered at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia to help envision how schools can/should/do change to meet the needs of students.

It feels overwhelming. The cynic in me relates to the video above. Is it possible?

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Zac Chase.

Zac is one of many amazing educators at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. He pinged me via Skype during my post Educon 2.0 hangover to simply say hello. I laid into him about how impossible this "change" stuff is in what I'd consider the "real world". He fired back with this. Admittedly, it's all still pretty heady stuff. The sort of "leave you confused, but at a higher level" stuff that emerges from DIY school reform conferences.

Then I had one of those "aggregator moments". The cynic in me watched the above YouTube video of the political candidates talking about change. The devil on my shoulder celebrated what will be a nice little "lol" moment when I pass it to Twitter. The very next piece in my aggregator was Zac Chase telling a story of making a simple, positive phone call home to parents.

"It's the best way to end a Monday I know."

Zac isn't revolutionary. Neither is the Science Leadership Academy. It's simply the result of small bits of change...a phone call, a conversation, an instant message, a get-together...accelerated by this hyper-networked culture and a willingness to try.

"Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make." (Link)

Thanks SLA. Thanks to the rest of you that I met in Philadelphia as well.

Posted by John Pederson at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll introduce myself to the community through a story of where I came from. I'm ditching the typical resume bullets and going straight to the stories that have shaped me. Yes, it exceeds 140 characters.

In 1995 I was jumping the hoops of becoming a secondary social studies teacher. It was time for Social Studies Teaching Methods. Twenty-five preservice teachers all worried about what characteristics would differentiate them while trying to crack into our profession. Time came for our first formal classroom teaching experience. Madeline Hunter and the whole nine yards. Carefully crafted lesson plans with a hook, objectives, guided practice, closure, etc. I don't mean to diminish the methods or philosophy, perhaps I was too hung up on content. Our prompt was to create and deliver a 30 minute lesson related to the Bill of Rights. Imagine twenty five preservice teachers taking their first shot at formal teaching. Deconstructing and then reconstructing part of the Bill of Rights in a prescriptive manner. This project obviously needed a bit of spice. How could I make it different?

There was this crazy "world wide web" thing emerging at the time. Forget that stuff they were showing up in the library. I borrowed a projector and computer from the computer science department across campus, hooked into Internet, and added much needed spice to this exercise in social studies teaching. Rather than drone on about some aspect of the Bill of Rights, showed budding teachers this new Mosaic program and gave them the gift of unlimited content. We could be free of textbooks and hand-me-down content from colleagues. Everything we needed to know about the Bill of Rights was (or soon would be) on this Internet thing.

"Raise your hand if you've heard of this World Wide Web thing?" Most hands raised timidly. "How many of you have actually used it to find materials?" Three. I was onto something.

I bent the Bill of Rights theme into an exercise in information literacy. I got all Madeline Hunter on how teachers could use this Internet to find unlimited content for use in their classroom.

"D-. You taught us how to use computers and nothing about the Bill of Rights." Evil red pen.

While I'm by no means the perfect student, I'm not the D- type. Especially when I just rocked the world of these preservice teachers. What could be more beneficial than "all the world's information at your fingertips"? I was jacked up about this grade thing and went to other faculty in the department for a reality check. I wanted to know if I was nuts. Didn't they understand?

The department's other social studies methods instructor, Dr. Helen Rallis, took me in at that point and simply said "You show me this Internet thing, I'll help you on the educational side." Deal.

What began as massive failure turned into a powerful relationship and a great story.

I arrived to present at a teacher in-service day this morning. I had five groups staggered throughout the day to learn about copyright and digital 21st century literacy. Thirty minute chunks of time. I'd spice it up by giving them all of the photos (Flickr Creative Commons) and content (Wikipedia) available at your fingertips, available for free, to anybody in the world.

During the question and answers at the end of the fourth session a teacher raised her hand.

"The Technology Committee discussed this last fall and decided Wikipedia should be blocked for all students because the information cannot be verified as true."

Fail. Another great story though.

Share your best "Fail" story below.

Posted by John Pederson at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)