This afternoon I installed a computer for a family that I have known for several years. Mum and Dad are good Kiwis who work very hard to give their kids what they consider to be the best. We have kept their aging computer going for quite a while but earlier this week the whole thing came to a grinding halt. It was crunch time. They pay for their family to have a decent broadband connection and consider it important to have printer cartridges so that the kids can print out their ‘projects’. Today we put in a brand new entry level computer. Rather than a chainstore piece of rubbish we put in a custom built entry level computer that can easily be upgraded over the next couple of years

It’s really easy to forget this part of the educational jigsaw puzzle. These are the people who want the absolute best for their kids. Their kids play netball and rugby and are part of kapa haka and choir. They scrimp and save to send their kids on trips to Kelly Tarletons, MOTAT and the Zoo. They grumble about camp fees but then work really hard to help out the families who can’t afford to send their kids away. These are the parents who always help on school trips and at galas and fundraising events. They are also the families who are first in line at parent interviews.

I would recommend that every ICT facilitator, every instructional technologist, every district superintendant to go in and set up a computer for a real life family.

Go in and talk about what concerns them about ICTs in classrooms and in schools. Sit down and have a chat about the kind of assignments that their kids are being set and the sort of resources that they are being asked to use. Have a chat about the computers that families are using and the issues that they are facing. Talk about the assessment criteria and the rubrics that comes home in the bottom of a school bag.The amazing thing about setting up a computer is that there is time to chew the fat, to talk about the stuff that really matters.

It’s interesting. And even though I am a parent of an intermediate (13 years old next week) school age child, I am continually levelled by the discussions that I have with other Mums and Dads. We all want the best for our kids. Some of us don’t know what is best and so we are guided by what our noisiest child says or by the next deadline. The only people that we can discuss this with are our neighbours or the parents of our kids’ friends. Many of us are quite computer savvy but we inhabit a very different world to that of our children so our knowledge is rendered useless.

I’m not sure what the answer is. But I do think we need to start talking to ALL of the stakeholders.

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In the early days of the internet Usenet was developed to allow people to communicate and even to share files. Usenet resembled a lot of the bulletin boards that its users moved from and it quickly grew into a huge communication network with a hierachical structure. It was amazing. Ifyour method of getting onto the internet (ISP) had a newsgroup server you could get a newsgroup reader and get involved. If your ISP didn’t have an nntp server then you could login to a free or paid one.

Usenet newsgroups were cool. In the old days I used to dial up, fire up Forte Free Agent (my reader of choice) and I would download hundreds of message headers. I’d skim through and mark anything that interested me for download later. Posts were sorted into threads and if I was interested in something I could subscribe to a thread and even join in the conversation – all from my ancient computer in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand. It was very cool. (Sidenote: Usenet was a crazy mix of democracy and anarchy. Anyone could join in and for the most parts newsgroups were unmoderated and uncensored. There was a way to do things though and newbies were given a hard time for not adhering to the correct netiquette. Bloggers Code of Conduct? People really need to take a look backwards in order to go forwards – but that’s another post)

Usenet posts were archived in dejanews and you could search them. There was an ocean of information out there in the ether and you could choose to get it if you wanted it. In 2001 Google bought out Deja (which is what dejanews had become) and Usenet morphed into what we know today as Google Groups.

Enough of the history lesson.

O’Reilly Media coined the term Web2.0 to describe a new phase in the evolution of the internet. In a piece from 2005, (entitled What is Web2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models For the Next Generation of Software) Time O’Reilly writes,

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

If you do a cruise around the internet there is a common theme to material about Web2.0. The Wikipedia amalgamates a lot of those popular ideas when it says,

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,^[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.

Though the term suggests a new version of the Web, it does not refer to an update to Internet or World Wide Web technical standards, but to changes in the ways those standards are used. According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”^[2].

I don’t argue that Web2.0 exists and that many amazing, clever and wonderful applications have come from it. Many of the new tools out there make it increasingly easy to connect, collaborate and create. And that’s what we want. However, by getting caught up in the whole Web2.0 terminology we’re being sidetracked by the hype. Which is what we are trying to teach our kids not to do.

If you randomly pick six educational websites or blogs, I would wager that at least four of them will be talking about a cool new web application or an advance on an old one. A new feature in Flickr, a new calendar application, ad free wikis for educators. Twitter anyone? Then we all dive in and get excited about what we can do. And then someone changes the rules.

And the reason why someone changes the rules? It’s because the people that are designing these new and improved amazing cool toys want (need) to make a dollar. Every month hundreds of new ideas are launched onto the internet in the hope that (a) people will get excited, (b) the big boys will sit up, take notice and offer them some money or a job (or both). And then they can be part of the big boys.

Remember Jotspot? That was a very cool wiki. It probably is still very cool but in October of last year it was sold to Google and it hasn’t been seen since. And Flickr, a major Web2.0 posterboy, is no longer the benign photosharing site that it used to be. That’s just a couple of examples.

I believe that as educators we need to jump off the Web2.0 merry-go-round and stand still for a minute. We need to take stock and look at the big picture. The internet has always been about communication. The new tools mean that it’s possible for anyone and everyone to be part of a (the?) conversation. Great. But the rules are continually changing. Those great little applications are going to disappear because something better will arrive on the scene or they are going to be bought out because they are that something that is better.

I think that it’s timely to go and have another look at EPIC. Either 2014 or 2015.

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David Warlick’s (in)famous “I don’t get it” post about social networking for ‘education 2.0 issues’ (Oh how I need to write up my 2.0 agonies. But I’ll save that for later.). David made the point that he just wasn’t into ‘clubhouses’ and said that

I don’t need someplace else to go to on the Internet. I need it to come to me, to my aggregator, or my mail box. I need it to be organic, infinitely shapable, and to be a valuable conversation.

And I agreed, although I kept that to myself.

Then a couple of days ago, Artichoke posted “Could do better”: A checklist for participatory communication for development . Arti looks at her (all of our) role as ‘edu_tech missionaries’ and looks at the implied assumptions of our roles. I think we’ve had a religious discussion before haven’t we?

While I was digesting Arti’s piece (I wasn’t stalking you Arti, just needed to think about it again… and again …), Konrad Glogowski wrote a great post entitled Autobiographical Practices . And it kind of started to come together.

Konrad writes,

I contemplated adding my name to one or more of these communities but it seems to me that they are nothing but containers, systems where the name threatens to define or even pre-define the discussions within. I thought the whole point of what we are experiencing now, educationally speaking, was to get away from boxes, systems, and containers. Now, it seems, we are building more. It is interesting that, instead of building our own networks using rss, for example, instead of charting our own paths as professionals and educators, we prefer to confine ourselves to pre-defined boxes.

And this is me! I struggle with the concept of an educational blog because it’s limiting and it encourages conformity. I want to see opposing points of view and I want to see world views. If I’m doing it my way (my blog, my RSS feeds, etc) I can be in charge.

Konrad next says,

However, according to Steve Hargadon, who created Classroom 2.0, professional development today can greatly benefit from social networking. He is right when he says that it is much easier for a novice to join a social community than start his or her own blog.

And this makes sense too. Except that this is all based on the assumption that everyone must be part of the blogosphere because this is where all the best conversations are happening. Try making that point in the nearest school staffroom.

I am regularly invited to participate in wikis, blogs and communities that have been set up apparentlyfor my benefit. In some cases I do participate, but I’m actually really a lurker. I’ve been that way for years so I’m quite good at it now. My aggregator gets a daily skim through and I also subscribe to the odd old fashioned email list. I’m quite happy to join a conversation, but I also want to be able to get out when I want. It’s all about having my own space really.

And I’ll come to the two point oh business soon.

Other useful brain food

Christopher D. Sessums:
How Do Educators Learn Successful Practices using Social Media/Social Software?

Stephen Downes:

To the School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates

One-Sided Discussions

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In his latest post, Guy discusses the ARSE: Asshole Rating Self Exam .The ARSE ‘index’ is a tongue in cheek (OK very bad pictures generated with that unfortunate phrase) self evaluation of a person’s rating on the asshole scale. If you skim through the questions you can see exactly what the whole thing is about.

Meandering through the questionaire, it struck me how easy it is to fall into the asshole type behaviour. How easy it is to rest on the certainty of the knowledge that we have and to make assumptions about the people who don’t have that knowledge or (worse) disagree with us. I thought about the whole 2.0 bandwagon that the interweb world is on – did you know that some people are looking at our capital city becoming Wellington 2.0, or that Seth Godin is looking forward to Web 3 and, horrors, Web 4?

The start of the New Zealand school year also signals the countdown to our first ICT PD conference. Every year I look forward to these gatherings for the networking and for the new ideas that are generated. Every year I am saddened by the number of people who have garnered some jargon, some cool tricks and present these in the name of learning.

I have some predictions for Learning@School 07:

1. Web 2.0 will be the most overused phrase
2. There will be some talk of School 2.0
3. There will be a lot of back-patting and self-congratulating
4. The best stuff will happen away from the conference centre

And then we will all go back to real life where interweb connections are flakey, where BOTs can’t quite see the point of sending money on all of this technology anyway and where Remuera politicians can use kids as news-bait.

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And share we did. Despite the naysayers and the knockers we kept on spreading our version of the truth. We rejoiced when people listened and converted themselves to our particular doctrine. We were saddened when people didn’t listen to our words, but that was OK because we knew that was the way that it was going to be and they needed to be weeded out anyway.

We regularly got together and held gatherings attended by people from all over New Zealand. It was really exciting when we had a speaker from overseas. One of our conferences would keep us going for months as we remembered and recounted all the wonderful speakers we had heard and presentations that we had attended.

Some of the people in our group struggled more than other people. For some it was because they had more than their fair share of trials and tribulations. We surrounded these people with love and encouraged them to spend more time inside our group where we could protect them from the vicious wolves who were just waiting for them to let down their guard.

Other people suffered because they didn’t Do Things The Right Way. They hung out on the edge of the group and occasionally strayed beyond the safety net of the organisation. Those of us who were good group members always struggled with our response to these people. They preferred to be individuals and associating with them could cause us to question our faith which could lead to us falling away from what the group knew was right. On the other hand, it was our sacred duty to warn these individuals of the folly of their course … And if they didn’t listen and fell away, we knew that it was for the best because they weren’t the right sort of people anyway.

There is a large portion of my life that I look back upon with a sense of disbelief. How could I have ever been so gullible? How could millions of other people be so gullible?

It’s actually really easy and it’s coming really soon right now to a group near you.

Last week someone called me a hopeless optimist. That hit home because I truly do want to believe in the power of something. There is a huge group of singing and waving educators out there who are speaking in the tongue of Web 2.0. I’d love to be right in the middle of them with my del.icio.us tags, Flickr photos and Elgg blog tucked into my conference bag.

But I can’t because I need to stand safely on the edge. It’s a wonderful thing to belong to a group, to hold common views and values and to be able to celebrate and share. But only when you actually fully agree. And I don’t think that Web 2.0 is the answer to all that ails us.
Artichoke calls it Blogger Frottage. I don’t have her way with words but I do know how to spot a problem when I see it.

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1. Content is Conversation

This, I like. The conversation is strong and it is often (:) ) lucid. The media of the conversations invites even more conversation. This reminds me of something said by our Canadian visitors last week. They talked about kids publishing in the media of their times. Blogs, podcasts, v-logs, wikis … are the first web-media of our times. Who know what is going to be next.

2. Content is organizing itself

David says,

Well this is a rather melodramatic statement, meant to start a conversation about how the way that information flows is largely resulting from the behavior of its readers. Aggregators, mashups, blog linkings, and other more esoteric techniques are causing us to reshape the information environment on a global and on a personal level.

I’m not so sure about that. To organise, structure, categorise content or “stuff” requires an understanding of tagging and the basics of social networking. I think that it’s still very haphazard. Tagging is a very personal thing and many of us just aren’t that good at it. So our content becomes pretty dis-organised and often the good “stuff” is only picked up when one of the better organised conversationalists picks up on it.

3. People are connect to each other through their content

This is a great statement. I’m not sure if he wants “connected” or “connecting” but I love it. Our content defines our connectors and our connections.

And so communities are built.

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