Steve Hargadon

Great Website Building Tool: Weebly.com

2008-12-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post something on the free Web-based website-building tool Weebly because I find that I use it for something at least a couple of times a week. I personally have about 10 websites that I've created there that are in various stages of deployment. I find it particularly amazing that I can purchase a domain name (I use GoDaddy but you can get them through Weebly as well) and then have a site up with that domain name in about 10 minutes.

Of course, then the tweaking of the site begins, but it's the lack of a real barrier to entry that allows me to feel experimental. As Clay Shirky says (paraphrasing): when failure is (almost) free, you try a lot more things! And this is how I like to work--get it up fast, get feedback, and make it better.

When a project won't necessarily benefit from user collaboration, instead of using Wikispaces or Ning, I now use Weebly. I created a private Weebly site for my daughter's soccer team, which I coach, and it was super-easy to posts practice and game information, maps, and other material and not to have to worry about communicating with everyone. I have also used it for my new project, K12OpenSource.com. I used Weebly for the landing page, which then handily links to the associated wiki and Ning sites. This allowed me to get the project started in a matter of hours, and when the site needs more sophistication, I can graduate to something appropriately more complex.

(I also love using customized prefixes to keep everything related. "http://www.K12OpenSource.com" is the Weebly site. "http://community.K12opensource.com" is the Ning site. And "http://wiki.K12OpenSource.com" is the wiki.)

More and more, as the tools become easier and cheaper, it seems to me that the value proposition of a project is no longer primarily the ability to create a revenue stream model in advance that will overcome the financial hurdles to creation (that's a mouthful); but rather the ability to quickly and easily gather an audience--and if the goal is commercial, working with that audience to find authentic services that they want you to provide.

Here's an "infommercial"-like video on Weebly that gives a pretty good sense of what it can do.

Why "Free" Can Make Commercial Sense

2008-12-01T09:49:00.001-08:00

Really good article by James Boyle on why free digital availability might make sense for parts of the publishing industry:

First, most people hate reading a book on a screen, but like finding out if it is worth buying. I am sure I have lost some sales, but my guess is that I have gained more new readers who otherwise would be unaware of my work, and who treat the digital version as a “sampler,” to which they then introduce others. This is a leap of faith but not an unreasonable one. Second, even professional authors make money in multiple ways other than by royalties - ranging from options on film production to commissions for magazine articles to consulting, teaching and speaker fees. Most are aided by wider exposure. As Doctorow says, “my biggest fear as an author isn’t illicit copying, it is obscurity.” Third, digital distribution is almost free. The “cost” is the gamble over lost sales, not remaindered books with their covers torn off. Some publishers are willing to take the risk to build current and future demand.

From Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b46f5a58-aa2e-11db-83b0-0000779e2340.html

Brilliant Creative Commons Introductory Video

2008-12-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

Help Build the K-12 Open Source Community

2008-11-25T06:59:00.000-08:00

One of the professional hats I wear is as the director of CoSN.org's K-12 Open Technologies Initiative. I also run the Open Source Pavilions and speaker series at the CUE.org and NECC ed tech conferences.

Because I'm a passionate advocate for Free and Open Source Software in K-12, I've been feeling for a while that the time is right for a stand-alone social network around its use. There is a good K-12 Open Source group within the Classroom 2.0 community, but groups don't have the same full functionality as stand-alone networks, and also don't have the same visibility. So I've done some reconfiguring with my www.K12OpenSource.com domain, creating a collaborative site which I hope will help to build the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem in K-12. The wiki that was previously there is now at http://wiki.k12opensource.com/, and I've set up a Ning community just for Open Source in K-12 at http://community.K12OpenSource.com/.

I hope you'll come join the community and help to build it. I believe that having an inviting and easy-to-use social network will increase exposure, adoption, and idea-sharing around Open Source in K-12 at a time when it is truly needed (both financially and pedagogically). We'll also need some folks to start groups around favored programs--please consider coming and doing that!

http://community.k12opensource.com

A Classroom 2.0 Colleague Whose Home Was Destroyed by a California Fire

2008-11-16T17:52:00.001-08:00

Barbara Barreda was one of the first members of Classroom 2.0. She is the principal of Saint Elisabeth School in California, and lost her home yesterday to the one of the major fires burning here.

Having to flee her home during the night with little notice, Barbara is staying with a friend, but I'm told she now has only has the clothes on her back and the few items she could throw into her car.

Barbara has asked for prayers and thoughts as she and her family make all the adjustments that they need to. Clarence Fisher and Jen Wagner have set up a donation fund for Barbara at http://www.jenuinetech.com/bbfund.htm to collect money to help her make it through the holidays. There are also instructions for sending cards, gift cards, or even other donations (Jen has clothes sizes).

Barbara has a special place in my heart, being the one and only attendee at the first EduBloggerCon, held at Shakey's Pizza in Palm Springs in March of 2007 during the CUE conference. Without Babara showing up, the idea of EduBloggerCon might have died on the spot!

I hope, if you are able, that you will consider making a donation to Barbara at this time.

Two Interviews

2008-11-08T05:09:00.000-08:00

The first (longer) interview was done by Pearson at NECC, after EduBloggerCon, and touches on that event, on "unconferences," on Web 2.0 in education, and on social networking. The second (shorter), done by SchoolTube at the CoSN CTO Clinic in Atlanta, focuses on the K-12 Open Technologies Initiative.

Thoughts on Social Networking in Education

2008-11-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted on the Intel Senior Trainers network.)

I really enjoyed the discussion and feedback from my last post. I love that dolphin story, and after posting it here I've been telling it more often when I speak and people really seem to like it.

We are doing a Webinar together next week, and as a follow-up to my thoughts about Web 2.0 and education, I want to talk a little in this post on the uses of social networking in education, and to give some perspective on why I am so "bullish" on the topic.

When I started Classroom 2.0, there was some very serious pushback from the "edubloggers," who were pretty much the educational technologists who were looking closely at new media. The belief was that the act of blogging, and becoming a part of the blogging conversation, were important for teacher professional growth and to be able to understand the transformative power of the participative Internet. Quite honestly, this message was not resonating with most educators--on top of all else that you are doing, you needed (they said) to 1) take time out to learn how to blog, 2) read and comment on other bloggers, 3) blog "to the empty room" for 9 months or more until finally, 4) people would start discovering your writing, and you'd begin the process of building your own personal learning community. Talk about a lot of work, with a long-term promise that was hard to comprehend when standing at the starting line!

As part of an ed tech interview series I was doing at EdTechLive.com, I interviewed both Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, the founders of something called "Ning." About eighteen months ago, Ning shifted gears in their core product and became purveyor of a service to "build your own social network." I immediately saw a huge opportunity to bring educators into the "discussion" without all of the work that was required in blogging. This wasn't a denial of the value of sblogging or of the personal transformations taking place for bloggers, but was, I think, a more realistic expectation of how the might start becoming part of the Web 2.0 world. There's a reason that MySpace has three times as many signups each day as there are people who start to blog--it's just plain easier to start, and you get feedback almost immediately.

But when I started Classroom 2.0, there was some pretty strong negative feedback from some of the more prominent edublogger voices in the community, who said, essentially, that my social network would make participation too easy. It would take away the personal benefit of the journeys that they had been on to get where they were. It was hard for them to see the benefits of Web 2.0 without the work that they had gone through to get there (through the snow uphill both ways...).

Pretty revealing of this was a comment from Will Richardson, maybe the most-followed "edublogger" at the time, some months after Classrooom 2.0 started. Will looked through the membership and said, plainly: "I don't know anyone here." What that represented to me was something amazing--that all kinds of people who hadn't previously been participants in the educational world of Web 2.0 had felt comfortable coming into the network. Classroom 2.0, or Ning, allowed someone to easily create a presence on the Web (in minutes), and then to both give and receive feedback within hours, not weeks or months. The threaded discussion forum is really the key, more than anything else, and it's part of what makes Ning and other social networking platforms in eduation so significant. While blogging, it can be argued, is very much a "look at me" medium, a threaded discussion is much more egalitarian and more conducive to "good" (tempered? thoughtful?) conversations. On a blog, the main author is on a pedestal, and blogs tend to favor posts which reflect the self-importance of the blogger or comments which tend toward extremism--likely because these are often the ways to get attention in a mass of information. The threaded discussion allows the asking of questions without the need to appear authoritative, the giving of responses that can be part of the answer, and where the contributions of many will ultimately produce a more nuanced, and thoughtful, outcome.

It's also been fascinating to watch educators, who have spent their lives evaluating other on their written output, gain an understanding of the value of somewhat spontaneous "dialog." One principal emailed me that it took her three hours to compose her first post on Classroom 2.0 because she was so worried about how others would perceive her writing. In a very healthy way, social networks in education still put a premium on communicating well and clearly, but favor content and contribution in such a way as to make "appearances" less important.

Another part of the great good that Ning and others have brought to education is the ability to recognize social networking as the the aggregation of Web 2.0 tools into a community and content creation environment, and not just sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In large part, this is because of the ability to create small, specialized networks as opposed to joining one large social networking universe. It's also because social networks are a new application, and the first uses of the application in the public eye were somewhat garish and unruly; but using the application to build something else, you can get a result which seems worlds apart from MySpace. If you look at Classroom 2.0, for example, or here at the Intel Community, you'll see a dialog which is so professional in nature that it's only real connection to MySpace are some similiar tools available to the users.

While the tools that are aggregated in social networks are not new, putting them together to build communities does make them somehow significantly more useful. In addition to the threaded discussion, the personal profile page has significance in education because it becomes a form of a "personal portfolio," where the contributions of the member along with their profile help to define them. The uploading of videos (and to a lesser degree, photos) become, in educational environments, more of a shared repository for the group than personal creative contributions. And the directory of members becomes the list of potential connections for reaching out to others with similar interests. Social network as professional development (which is what is obviously happening here) is not unlike the powerful but informal aspects of attending a conference: meeting others with similar interests, exchanging ideas, and sharing passions. What makes social networking for professional development so powerful is that 1) it's not geographically or physically bounded as a conference is, 2) it takes place 24X7, not just for a few days a year, 3) it allows for asynchronous contribution, so conversations can grow richer over time with more contributors, and 4) it allows for the "publishing" of material or contribution by those who would never previously have written an article for a journal or made a formal presentation at a conference.

The ability to gather like-minded or like-interested educators into social networks is clearly one of the pots of gold waiting for us at the end of this rainbow. If 12,000+ educators have been interested in enough in Web 2.0 in education to sign up for Classroom 2.0, think about all the other educators who care deeply about their history specialty, or their language teaching, or their math courses to create and gather in ways that were never really possible when constrained by time and geography. Social networking will potentially allow educators to more easily develop specialty interests that begin to influence their careers, as they become known for those interests in a way that was much harder when it required formal publishing or speaking.

And if we think all of that is incredible, I can't wait to see what this does in the classroom, as students also begin to be able to have voice and to collaborate in these same ways. There are great stories coming out of engaged classrooms where the tools of social networking are helping students to be more active contributors in meaningful ways, recording their work, and writing very publicly before their peers. When I was in school, the only people who saw my written work were my parents and my teachers. I wasn't getting real feedback, I was getting the feedback of someone being prepared to someday write for real-world feedback... probably years in the future. These students are learning to communicate with their peers, with adult facilitation and mentoring, in a way that only those who wrote for the student newspaper before were able to do. What a great world awaits us.

Future of Edcation Slides

2008-11-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

I've been giving this presentation more and more, and I think it's getting better each time. :) I'll work on posting a new version with the audio, but for now I wanted to post the slides for those who are asking to see them again.

(New) Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education (Slides Only)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Moving Toward Web 2.0 in K-12 Education

2008-10-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted as part of the Britannica Blog Forum "Brave New Classroom 2.0" opening the week of October 20, 2008. Please post any comments there.)

The title of this post is a watered-down version of my typical opening line on this topic, both because of the importance of allowing for true dialog on this topic (which can sometimes be lost in the strident opining that blogging seems to engender), and because of the difficulty of quantifying educational success when talking about the particular outcomes that I hope to show are largely inherent in and facilitated by the use of Web 2.0. Normally I would say, "Web 2.0 is the future of education," and while I harbor a hope that will be true, I think it might be more accurate to say that "Web 2.0 will be a significant part of the future of learning," and that in the best case scenario it will become an important part of our formal educational institutions.

My personal definition of Web 2.0 is not complicated. With an appropriate nod to Tim O'Reilly, who used the phrase originally in a business context, I'd like to suggest that for the sake of our discussions around education that Web 2.0 is simply the use of the Internet as a two-way medium- - -that it is a platform upon which content is not only consumed but also created. For my generation, our use of the Web largely mirrored our experiences with print and broadcast media: we were the audience, and a select few were the creators (this would be Web 1.0, if you will). For my children and our students today, their use of the Web often entirely revolves around content that they and their friends have created, and within Web frameworks or scaffolding that facilitate that creativity rather than providing the content for them. They build profile pages, upload photos and videos, and interact with each other and that content through active commenting systems.

Web 2.0, defined this way, is facilitating a dramatic change in our relationship to information. The advent of printing press lowered the cost of producing written material, and Web 2.0 not only brings that cost now to essentially zero (anyone in this country can go to a public library and use a computer for free and with free software publish to the web), it is also bringing the nature of information publication as a conversation to the user who used to just be a part of "the audience." While most of us watched those conversations taking place between trusted authorities or authors before in a world of broadcast media, we are often now immersed in them ourselves.

Seeing the Web as a conversation is very helpful in understanding how our paradigms about information will have to change. We often speak of "information overload," and the perception that there is too much information can reinforce our belief that information needs to be more carefully controlled and vetted before being "allowed" to become public. When, however, we see the ever increasing amount of content as "conversations" that are taking place, it becomes an educational imperative to teach ourselves and students to be productive participants in those conversations. I like to tease educators by claiming that the answer to information overload is to create (and to teach the creation of) more information--a paradox in our existing paradigms, but self-evident in a new understanding.

What is abundantly clear is that no matter what our schools are currently doing, most of our students are already actively involved in this content creation and conversation outside of school. In a series of reports recently released by BECTA (the government agency leading the UK drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning) on Web 2.0 technologies for learning, students ages 11 - 16 were surveyed. 74% reported that they had at least one social networking site account and 78% reported having uploaded pictures, video, or music to the web--with 50% having done so in the previous week of being asked. If we make the somewhat logical assumption that most parents are still living in a Web 1.0 world (largely passive consumers of content created by others) , then whether we see the Web as a dangerous collection of minefields or as an unparalleled learning environment, most youth are participating on the Web without the benefit of much guidance or mentoring from the adults who are most interested in their progress and well-being.

So, if for no other reasons than we might muster to justify driver's education in schools (learning to do something very important that carries some inherent and significant personal and social dangers), we can argue for the need to be teaching Web 2.0 as a part of K-12 education. But I believe there are more positive, less alarmist, reasons. In fact, I think the inherent characteristics of Web 2.0 are so aligned with significant educational pedagogies that we are going to have to dramatically rethink our educational institutions and expectations because of them. Even though the benefits of Web 2.0, like those of a liberal-arts education, resist easy assessment methods and therefore present a challenge to how we measure educational success, I'm optimistic that they will ultimately prove so valuable as to require that we rethink teaching and learning.

A caveat is perhaps in order. For 25 years we've watched computer fad follow computer fad in education, each promising to transform learning. It's absolutely appropriate to be skeptical of claims of technological El Dorados. Hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, have been spent on outfitting schools with computers, and most of us would appropriately claim that the impact on student achievement has been little to none. But I would submit that, as happened in our business culture 20 years ago, a set of technologies that actually transform our traditional methods will become the driving catalyst for ubiquitous access to computers at school. What we currently have are computers purchased and maintained largely by school business offices, relatively divorced from teaching methodologies, and either not in a quantity or in a condition to allow overworked teachers to change their teaching methods. Driven not by technology vendors or unproven theories, Web 2.0 instead seems likely to change education precisely because it is a disruptive external change.

What are, then, the aspects of Web 2.0 that translate into achieving educational goals? Let me suggest the following list of educational benefits of Web 2.0, which I hesitate to claim as exhaustive, but which I hope will help the discussion.

Engagement. This is often a promised result of technology, so I feel the need to address and defend it early on. Because the engagement of Web 2.0 is in the act of content creation, and seems to exist independent of the particular program being used or even of being in a formal learning environment, this claim seems not only reasonable but compelling. Students who continue to post to their blog or to stay involved in discussion forums during their vacations exemplify the power of Web 2.0 to engage students because of the authentic nature of the work rather than being required assignments.

Authenticity. Both having an authentic audience, and having the contributed work be authentic, argue for Web 2.0 as an active part of K-12 education. When I wrote essays in school (back in the day...), only my parents and my teachers saw what I wrote. I was, in effect, writing for "practice" with relatively little feedback. Students today are creating on the Web for very real audiences, and their writing or production has to pass a very real test: are they communicating well? Whether it is the peer audience in school which keeps their Web 2.0 programs within the "walled garden" of the school network, or it is publishing for the world, both the work and the audience are authentic.

Participation. That is, actually being a contributor to world's body of knowledge. Previously, to pursue an educational interest as part of a larger part of one's life work, that interest had to be within the relatively narrow confines of existing institutional structures in order to be worthy of publication or presentation--and was rarely available to students. Now, in an amazing flowering of the Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" model (www.thelongtail.com), students (and teachers!) can find specific intellectual paths to tread where they are able to participate, say, as an historian and not as someone preparing to be an historian. A student can write a report on an historical figure, or a scientific theory, and both publish that to the web and also participate in meaningful ways with other students and adults interested in the same topic. (Think of all the historical figures and topics that might otherwise not receive much attention.) There is no good reason to keep our youth "preparing" for life until their mid-twenties when their contributions to society could be so important to both us and them much earlier.

Openness and Access to Information. The backbone of the Internet "Revolution" is openness. Open computer standards, open software, and open content. Web 2.0 is making obsolete many of the restrictions on access to information that were intended to protect the rights of creators, but instead mostly inhibited learning by others. When the world's knowledge doubles in short periods of time, the incentives or rewards for keeping information proprietary significantly diminish, and the resulting willingness to share presents great opportunities to learn and to participate. The ability to "look something up" or to learn something new has never been greater.

Collaboration. I remember even when I was growing up that collaboration was said to be important. But, truly, it wasn't. Or, at least, it wasn't what was really rewarded, either in school or in the business world. Web 2.0 has actually given real practical value to a character trait we wanted to instill. In the world of Web 2.0, collaboration is not only king, but it can be seen and assessed--look at the history page of a wiki, for example, or the linked list of contributed comments on the personal profile page of a social network. Web 2.0 has created an unparalleled ability to build or participate in personal learning networks and communities of interest or practice.

Creativity. We are, to paraphrase Clay Shirky, in the midst of the greatest increase of creative capability in the history of the world. A regular student can write, film, and edit a video which then can be uploaded to YouTube and potentially seen by more of an audience than some commercial films actually garner.

Passionate Interest and Personal Expression. More than just the ability to build a profile page on MySpace, Web 2.0 actually gives both students and educators to build for themselves a online portfolio of the endeavors they are passionate about. Where the resume and the degrees have been our short-cut indicators of abilities and accomplishments, the personal body of work now contained and hopefully organized on the Web gives everyone who wants it the the opportunity for an expression of personal interest and achievement.

Discussion. A lost art in culture and politics, in my view, is the thoughtful discussion. One of the great features of Web 2.0 is the discussion forum, which provides an environment for learning how to actually talk about things. While I may feel that a lot of the discussion that takes place in the "blogosphere" is overly antagonistic in order to be seen, it is discussion, and often becomes much more thoughtful in the context of a discussion forum.

Asynchronous Contribution. The abilty to contribute to discussions after class, or from home, provides a much broader opportunity for participation that the traditional class discussion. Students with different contribution styles, or who process information over time, are now more participative.

Proactivity. Web 2.0 inherently rewards the proactive learner and contributor. My wife and I (both first children ourselves) raised our oldest child to succeed in the world in which we grew up, which rewarded being a good, quiet follower, who would to work for someone who would tell her what to do and how to do it. But the world has changed, and employers want and the world needs students who have learned to participate actively and independently. The "spirited" child (our second daughter) is much more likely to be able to work on things she likes and is good at because of her willingness to be proactive.

Critical Thinking. The vast amount of data on the Web requires more critical thinking than was needed when I was growing up. In my era of "trusted authorities," Time Magazine told me most of what I needed to know about the news. There was actually a lot more diversity of opinion on most topics than I was exposed to, which quickly becomes evident when you drill past the first page of a Wikipedia article and look at the discussion and history tabs. Unlike the previous traits of Web 2.0, I think this one really requires good adult mentors, so let's finish this list for now and get to that.

One of the amazing impacts of Web 2.0 is watching long-time educators have their own personal learning transformed by these new tools of Web participation---especially as they discover professional development venues on the Web that help to release the inclinations to help others that often prompted them to become teachers. Their own experiences with Web 2.0 in this regard dramatically shape new expectations for what opportunities they are going to provide their students. But other educators are understandably afraid: of the learning curve, of the changes taking place, and of their own ability to play a valuable role in an educational world shaped by the individualized learning and "unlimited" content and opportunities. Used to being the provider or dispenser of knowledge and the authority, they are unsure of the role they would play in a world of Web 2.0 education. They are also, and often rightly, concerned that academic rigor is being lost in a world of easy creation and limited constraints.

I think it helps to remember that most of the character traits of Web 2.0 mentioned above are significantly enhanced, if not dependent on, devoted adults helping to mentor and guide students. Having ready access to information does not make one a scholar, but it is scholars that we must help to create. A new favorite poem of mine follows:

ABOUT CROWS
by John Ciardi

The old crow is getting slow;
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.

At knowing things, the old crow is still
the young crow's master.
What does the old crow not know?
How to go faster.

The young crow flies above, below, and rings
around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.

(Thanks to Sarah Hanawald and Google Answers for this poem!)

This vision I've presented of Web 2.0 in K-12 education is not with its hurdles. Again, not exhaustively, but for discussion.

First: we've developed a negative cultural impression of social networking that comes out of the very power that will makes it such an effective tool for education. Fundamentally answering a human need to connect, create, and express ourselves, the immense popularity of some early social networks have showcased garishness and vulgarity that aren't inherent in the technology, but became an early part of it because of the very absence of influential adults. I can use the same raw building materials and tools, say, to build a casino or a school. If the casinos got build first because of the financial potential, that doesn't mean that I don't use building materials now to build the schools. Personal profile (portfolio!) pages, discussion forums, video and photo repositories, messaging, and other social networking functions can all bring real pedagogical value if we can get past our knee-jerknegative reactions to social networking.

Second: we won't be able to implement Web 2.0 expansively without ubiquitous computing, and so its use and adoption in schools will not be even or equal. This is a real issue, without easy answers, especially with the added challenge of having more and more personal phones and devices require networks which can accomodate them all.

Third: Teachers will need time and training to learn to use these tools in the classroom, and we're notoriously bad at spending time or money on this. Even if most of us were all to agree that Web 2.0 is the dramatic revolution that I'm making it out to be, there are still incredibly challenging demands on teachers' time that will make it hard for them to learn about these things. And because we're not likely to agree across the board on how important Web 2.0 is in education, adoption by teachers will also not be even or equal. Nor would we want it to be--sweeping educational practices need to be challenged and to survive those challenges in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Fourth: the legal liabilities that schools face because of concerns about a) student exposure to inappropriate material and b) exposure of students to potential predators will not be easy to overcome.

Fifth: information revolutions don't come with a manual, and we surely can't foresee many or most of the implications of what's taking place and how to integrate it into education. It will take time to build new "playbooks."

But even with that daunting list, I remain an optimist. The historic changes in information are going to drive historic changes in teaching and learning, and therefore in the institutions dedicated to education. We're long overdue for a really good discussion about the purpose of schools, and I believe that Web 2.0 will give us that opportunity. I believe that the long-term outcome will be a system of learning that is much more productive for our youth, and for their teachers, than currently exists.

(Again, please consider posting any comments at the Britannica Blog Forum.)

Surfing the Internet Boosts (Aging) Brains

2008-10-16T23:56:00.000-07:00

I found this NYTimes article fascinating because it confirms a feeling that I've had that my own cognitive skills have been significantly boosted by my increased use of the Web. As the article points out, research seems to show increased blood flow in certain areas of the brain when experienced "Googlers" when searching the web. The conclusion is that this is because of the decision making and complex reasoning that takes place when figuring out what to do with the information they receive.

This definitely resonated with me, and I wonder if we might not extrapolate further: that the sense many of us who are active Web 2.0 participants have that our learning has been "transformed" might actually have a physiological basis--a kind of brain rush. More than just doing Google searches, we are figuring out how to share our knowledge with others through a variety of tools that require more than a cursory understanding to use them effectively. Perhaps this is why we are so anxious for others to experience what we have--to be in this highly-engaged learning mode. Like many others, I would say that I've never felt more productive in my life as I have being engaged in the conversations of Web 2.0.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Now Available

2008-10-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released on Monday. A full review from PC Magazine makes a good case for considering it: "...if your company or agency has been buying Office for thousands of desktops, or if you work for or with a government that requires open-source formats, download OpenOffice.org and don't look
back."

Benjamin Horst write that there was such "demand for downloads (over 350,000 in the first 24 hours) that the website couldn't handle the traffic and was down or partly down for two days." He also details that "some cool new features include PDF import and editing, the ability to read (but not save) MS' new Office 2007 file formats, native Mac OSX support, much better margin notes, zooming, and side-by-side page views in Writer, tables in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent), UI improvements in Calc, greater speed, and even better support for extensions and languages of the world."

The Web Is a Becoming a Conversation

2008-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted on the Intel Senior Trainers network.)

This summer our family vacationed on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Maui is the perfect vacation spot for us: my in-laws have a time-share condo there, we know the area well enough to relax, and there's a Costco with inexpensive food right by the airport when you arrive!

Each day on vacation we would put on our bathing suits, take our snorkeling packs (which we'd purchase some years ago at that same Costco), and then pick a beach for the day's exploration. This year we were lucky and found several spots with groups of turtles to watch and we'd swim along with them, believing that the older and scarred ones were the wisest of earth's creatures, and the young ones had the surfer accents from "Finding Nemo."

Then one evening, as we made our nightly trek to the beach to watch the sunset, we passed by someone who asked us if we'd seen "the dolphin" yet. We quickly walked up the ridge where a crowd of people had gathered, looked out into the water where everyone else was staring, and shortly saw the dark shadow of a dorsal fin just offshore. We looked over at the adjacent beach and there were probably another 100 people all watching the same thing. I was fascinated by the connection we all seemed to be having with this one dolphin, the fin appearing here and there, each time all us craning to catch a glimpse of it. We'd felt so lucky to have had such a great experience with the turtles, but there was no question that the mere glimpse of a dolphin gave us a feeling which was unique.

On our previous trips to Maui, the dolphin story would have ended there, but this year the story had a significantly different ending. As my wife and I were sitting at breakfast the next morning in a local restaurant, remarking on what a great experience the dolphin sighting had been, I wondered out loud if there might not be a website where dolphin sightings were being tracked so that we could see some more. It didn't seem likely. But it then occurred to me that were I to do a search on Flickr for photos tagged "dolphin" and "maui," and that by sorting them by the most recent posting dates, this search might actually be the equivalent of a dolphin sightings list for the island. So, on my Internet enabled phone, I did the search, and sure enough someone had posted photos of Spinner Dolphins the day before from Lanai. We asked our waitress where Lanai was, and as we were explaining our dolphin quest, a fellow at the next table leaned over and gave us the low-down. He told us that we could take a ferry to Lanai (a smaller, adjacent island) from the city of Lahaina, and that near where the ferry docks on Lanai is a beach where dolphins frequently come to swim. On my Web phone we then looked up the ferry company, checked their departure times, then called and made reservations for our family.

The next morning we woke our children up at 5:30, drove to Lahaina, and took the ferry to Lanai. Carrying our snorkeling gear, we made the five minute walk over to Hulopoe Bay where there were maybe 15 other people on the beach. We picked a shade tree, put our gear down, looked out in the water--and a sudden chill ran through us all. We could see the fins of a dozen or more dolpins out in the water. Others on the beach immediately did the same thing we did, which was to run toward the water, trying to put on sunscreen and our snorkeling gear at the same time, and then to swim out the 50 yards or so to where the dolphins were.

We hadn't needed to hurry. Over the course of the next three hours, sometimes maybe as many as 50 dolphins were in the bay, almost teasing and playing with us, sometimes coming so close we could have touched them. Often whole groups would swim right under and around us, then some would leap out of the water spinning and twisting, dazzling in their beauty. It was like being in a surreal dream, but for my wife, it was actually the dream of a lifetime: to swim with dolphins in the wild. Sheer exhaustion was the only thing that pulled us from the water, and while we ate lunch up the hill from the beach, we continued to watch those Spinner Dolphins come in and out of the bay, swimming and jumping for close to two more hours.

During that lunch, on what seemed (and really is) the remote and barren island of Lanai, I incredibly had almost full bars on my cell phone. So I looked up Spinner Dolpins on the Web and as a family we then read through several different websites to learn why scientist believe they jump and spin, and much more about them.

I think that part of what I love about this experience is the way in which is so encapsulates the incredible changes in our day-to-day lives that the "interactive" Web is bringing. Our exploration of the physical world was shaped and changed by a combination of technologies that are historic in their impact. Our relationship to information is changing, and this is not just some theoretical change being documented in PhD dissertations, it's a dramatic reshaping of where and how we get our information, who produces that information, and how much of it is available. The dolphin story shows not only the impact of the Web as a faster, easier, and more pervasive way to find information--it also demonstrates how significant parts of that information are now contributed by those who used to be primarily information "consumers" but who are now part producers of the larger information universe.

Just ten years ago, the information on the web was largely just an fancy electronic reflection of our experience with the mainstream media of television, radio, and the printed word. We've lived in a "broadcast" world, where a relatively tiny segment of society produced and distributed that media, and most of us were passive consumers of it. Now we face a change in our relationship to information that is quite possibly larger than the the changes brought about by the printing press. Whereas the printing press dramatically reduced the cost of publishing and made material more widely available, the Internet's two-way capability has not only brought that cost essentially to zero (I can go to a public library, and using a web browser can post for free to a blog, a wiki, or a dialog forum) and made that information literally ubiquitous; but it has also changed publishing from a largely one-way act to a shockingly vibrant world of "conversations" where those we previously called the audience are now active participants.

It is hard for us to understand the implications of a world where more content is produced on YouTube in six months than was created in all of television's history, but I think we can say with some certainty that if we do not start to help our students become part of the conversation then our educational institutions will become increasingly irrelevant--just as the monasteries did that once housed the all-important scribes. On the other hand, if we can temper the natural fears that come with change (and are sometimes reinforced by the chaos that change can produce), we can actually see a world of incredible opportunity for students: a world where the breadth of subjects to study is only matched by the breadth of subjects students can actually become contributors to.

I believe that this is where we are headed, into a world in which information is so abundant that learning how to participate in the world's knowledge conversation becomes the primary responsibility of our educational organizations, and where students learn to contributors to society by actually contributing under the tutelage of wise mentors. If this is an accurate vision, then we need to help educators experience for themselves the these same transformative changes and opportunities. If we don't, we're just asking them to learn about one more technology fad in a parade of technological fads that were each supposed to remake education, and their interest reflect their "technology fatigue."

I started Classroom 2.0 (www.classroom20.com) to help educators become participants in the "conversation" of the Web without requiring that they start a blog or create a wiki. Classroom 2.0 is a social network. We'll save the distinction between social networking and our perceptions of MySpace and Facebook for my next post, but suffice it to say that professional social networks allow educators to contribute even just a single sentence to a discussion, and feel the amazing change that takes place in our personal learning and motivation through that contribution and the ensuing responses. I'm excited to learn about the work that you are doing here in your own network for Intel Senior Trainers, and to hear your experiences and thoughts related to these same topics. I'll be posting again next week, and then we're scheduled to have a live web meeting.

Here's hoping I have something valuable to add to your "conversations!"

ISTE Sets a Great Example

2008-10-14T15:25:00.001-07:00

I just received a mass email from Lelie Conery, the Deputy CEO of ISTE, and the NECC Conference Chair. She's inviting participation in a dialog about ISTE's fair-use guidelines, specifically as they relate to pod- and vod-casting at NECC.

As many might remember, ISTE ran smack dab into the historical confluence of formal conferences versus audience streaming last year, and initially responded as almost all other large organizations would have: prohibiting any audio or video recording without express written permission from both the presenter and from ISTE. To their great credit, they heard the (clamoring) voices of the community and changed their policy--setting a great example for both the new policy and having the community help you get there.

Leslie has started a promised additional discussion on this policy to get more community input and feedback. You can see this discussion, along with the original and revised policies, at the NECC Ning network. Right now is the start of the open comment period, with draft guidelines coming out in December, and then final guidelines in January.

The ISTE support we get for Open Source Pavilion, EduBloggerCon, and NECC "Unplugged" already predisposes me to appreciate them for being able to try to benefit the community while dealing with the practical realities of running a large conference and the institutional demands that brings. Working with the community to form an appropriate media policy is another example, for me, of the kind of transparency and collaboration that the educational world needs.

Way to go, ISTE.

NECC Stress? Submissions Due Today...

2008-10-08T14:49:00.001-07:00

OK, so even though submissions are due today for speaking at NECC 2009, I want to give you one reason to breathe a little easier if you're feeling stress.

I've been given approval to move forward again with both EduBloggerCon and NECC "Unplugged." EduBloggerCon planning will start in a few months, and we'll make a real effort to involve the larger community in the what and how of that event. I've asked for as many breakout areas as they can give us, with the guiding philosophy being that we (I!) won't try to control the breakouts like we (I!) did last year. That was a pretty clear lesson!

And as excited as I am to gather again for the all-day fun that EduBloggerCon can be, I'm really delighted to have NECC Unplugged being supported again. The idea behind NECC Unplugged is that anyone who wants to can sign up and give a short presentation during NECC--whether it is on a topic that hasn't hit the ed-tech radar before today but becomes significant, or it is a topic that gets turned down in the formal submission process but you still feel has real value. Long live the wiki as a conference organizing tool! :)

For those who care, the Open Source presence at NECC will remain strong--and maybe stronger because of this economy. We'll have our "Pavilion" once again, and will have an active playground area where we hope to get the legendary Jeff Elker involved with his students.

And don't forget the CUE.org show in March '09 in Palm Springs, California, where all of this same good stuff happens as well! And if you're going to be at NSBA's T+L Conference in a few weeks in Seattle, we will have an Open Source lab room there for the very first time! Wahoo! If you're going to be there, come find me.

A Great Web 2.0 App: Collaborative Mind Mapping with Comapping

2008-10-06T23:04:00.001-07:00

There's a special kind of thrill for me in finding a Web 2.0 application that really fills a need and has a business model that I'm glad to support. Comapping.com is such an application: a collaborative mind-mapping or outlining program that starts out simply enough for quick use, allows you to intuitively discover more sophisticated features, that feels rock-solid, and then costs about 1/10th of what you'd expect.

My learning curve for immediate productivity was all of about 10 minutes, and not only was I able to build a pretty sophisticated mind map for a keynote I was giving a couple of days later, and then to export it into a word-processing format; but I was also able to use it the next week to fully conduct an all-day brainstorming meeting with a more than a dozen participants, which I did by projecting my laptop screen during the whole day. The session was a pre-conference day at the K-12 Open Minds Conference on "large scale deployments" of Linux and Open Source Software, and we built a pretty great outline for what will become a white paper on the subject.

The speed and smoothness of the program are matched by intuitive keystroke or mouse actions. Focusing on subtopics, or shifting back to the whole view, is very easy. While I did a quick experiment with someone else adding to a mind map concurrently, which worked very well, I haven't yet tried the task management tools, which include email notification, and which would seem to be a great complement to organized problem-solving or brainstorming.

OpenOffice.org and Open Source Usage Increasing

2008-10-06T19:57:00.001-07:00

A short story in ComputerWorldUK discusses the increased usage of the Open Source office suite OpenOffice.org, including a report that 25% of the entire office suite market in Brazil is filled by OpenOffice.org, or 12 million users (in Portuguese at http://abretesw.blogspot.com/2008/10/openofficeorg-tem-25-de-quota-de.html). That's not as big a surprise as it might sound, since Brazil is very Open-Source oriented. But in my work with CoSN.org I'm frequently speaking to chief technology officers in K-12 schools and districts, and I'm hearing more and more about large-scale transitions to OpenOffice.org that are saving tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees.

It's important to remember that a free (as in cost) license doesn't mean that implementation and support are free, but when an Open Source program is good enough to replace a program with a hefty licensing fee, I can see more and more education institutions making the change. And when you look at an example like the State of Parana, Brazil, where they have 12 people running 44,000 school computers (over 2,000 schools) because of Linux and Open Source Software, the possibilities for more ubiquitous computing become pretty darn compelling.

Just as interesting to me is the Open-Source-AS-education angle, as opposed to the Open-Source-IN-education examples. Teaching technical computer classes with Open Source software has a strong pedagogical basis, but even more than that, would have significant practical benefits to students--and yet, we rarely--if ever--do it. Somewhere in the range of 70% of the world's webservers run on the Open Source program Apache, and yet it's just not taught anywhere. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Pearl are serious business tools that can be obtained for free, have open code (great for learning), and will run on old computers. So why is it that we aren't teaching them to students who could actually use those skills to get a job out of high school? Maybe it has something to do with the lack of advertising dollars being spent to promote them to educators... :)

I Want a Netbook. Badly.

2008-10-06T17:19:00.001-07:00

The use of Linux on many of the new, smaller "netbook" computers is providing a pretty unique opportunity for expanding interest in Linux, especially in education. I have to admit the fast boot times of the machines I played with (EEEPC and 2GoPC) at the K12 Open Minds Conference were impressive. But it's the combination of fast boot time and Linux reliability with a larger keyboard and the 6-cell battery (8+ hours) that really has me chomping at the bit.

After really diving into Amazon.com and drilling down on the specs and the reviews, the Acer Inspire One looks like the real deal. $399 with Windows XP, which probably means $349 or so with Linux. Amazing. Unfortunately it's not currently in stock, although others are selling the XP version so that means it should be at Amazon pretty soon (and I'm very loyal to Amazon because of the great service I get with them and the free 2-day shipping for being an Amazon Prime member).

The Continued Growth of Social Networking (in Education)

2008-10-06T17:00:00.001-07:00

http ://blog.ning.com/2008/10/500000-social-networks-on-ning.html

Ning reached 500,000 social networks, a fascinating milestone. Classroom 2.0 passed 12,000 members this weekend, and the Ning in Education network hit 2600 members a few hours ago. I think we're learning a lot about using the community and creativity aspects of social networking in highly educational settings, and (maybe) getting a little past our pre-conceived notions of social networking that came from early experiences with MySpace and Facebook.

Of course, even though I do consulting work for Ning and consider myself their "education evangelist," I want to say "Good on ya, Ning!" I do believe that they've played a great role in helping to redefine our perceptions in this area.

Becta Report on Benefits of Web 2.0 in the Classroom

2008-10-05T23:01:00.003-07:00

http://news.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=38417

From the article:

Web 2.0 helps to encourage student engagement and increase participation – particularly among quieter pupils, who can use it to work collaboratively online, without the anxiety of having to raise questions in front of peers in class – or by enabling expression through less traditional media such as video.
Teachers have reported that the use of social networking technology can encourage online discussion amongst students outside school.
Web 2.0 can be available anytime, anywhere, which encourages some individuals to extend their learning through further investigation into topics that interest them.
Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online and this can encourage attention to detail and an overall improved quality of work. Some teachers reported using publication of work to encourage peer assessment.

Call for Presentations on Open Source at CUE and NECC

2008-09-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Two educational technology conferences that have been SUPER supportive of Open Source Software and Open Technologies are CUE and NECC. Both sponsor "Open Source Pavilions" with Linux labs, and both have speaker tracks on Open Source.

If you are interested in speaking at either the CUE or NECC 2009 conferences on Open Source Software, Open Content, or Open Technologies, I'd like to encourage you to submit speaking proposals.

CUE: Due this Friday, September 12th! http://www.cue.org/conference/present

NECC: Due Wednesday, October 8th. http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/program/

I hope you will consider participating!

Wikis in Education Celebration September 11th, 2008

2008-09-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from www.stevehargadon.com)

Wikispaces has given away 100,000 ad-free educational wikis, and has just announced they are going to give away 250,000 more. We're going to celebrate the general use of wikis in education and Wikispace's amazing milestone by having founder Adam Frey and the Wikispaces team join us Thursday evening, September 11, 2008, for an open Classroom 2.0 discussion of the use of wikis in education.

If you are using wikis in education, or if you want to learn why you might consider doing so, please join us at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / Midnight GMT in our Elluminate room. We'll have lots of time for Q&A, which you are welcome to start beforehand in the forum discussion on Classroom 2.0.

If you haven't used Elluminate before,.you can use the following link to verify your system compatibility with their online meeting tool: http://www.elluminate.com/support/. If you are not in the US, here's a time-clock link.

Kudos to Wikispaces, and to all educators who are exploring the use of Web 2.0 in education!

Live Web Meeting and Q&A with Creators of PBS Election Education Resources

2008-09-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from Infinite Thinking Machine)

On Wednesday, September 10th, at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern, the creators of the PBS multi-media AND social-media "Vote 2008" curriculum will take part in a Classroom 2.0 Live Conversation. You are invited to participate in this (free) Web event.

We'll first be given a personal tour of "Election 2008: ACCESS, ANALYZE, ACT: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement", the latest multimedia curriculum, which was developed in partnership with PBS Teachers and Temple University’s Media Education Lab. The project is aimed at encouraging teachers to experiment with social media/Web 2.0 tools in the classroom in order to promote both civic engagement and critical 21st century skills. Educators will be able to help develop students' understanding of the Presidential campaign process by harnessing the power of Web 2.0 for teaching media and information literacy, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and technology skills. There are more than a dozen social media tools showcased in this curriculum to engage middle-school and high school learners in the political campaign process.

Following the overview of the resources available, there will be a question and answer session. You may want to preview the "Vote 2008" election resources at PBS by going to http://www.pbs.org/teachers/vote2008/. You might consider taking the quick political quiz yourself (see below)! A wiki for the project is located at http://21stcenturycivicengagement.pbwiki.com/.

To join the event on September 10th, check the instructions on the Classroom 2.0 Live Conversations page at http://wiki.classroom20.com/live+conversations/. This event will also be recorded and a link to the recording will be posted soon after.

The K-12 Open Minds Conference: Open Source in Education

2008-07-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

Some of you may know that one of my educational passions--besides Web 2.0--is the use of Open Source Software. I hope you'll forgive me for this one-day promotional blitz on the K12 Open Minds Conference, Sept. 25 - 27, in Indianapolis, Indiana. If you have an interest in Open Source Software and its benefits for K-12 schools, I hope you will consider attending and/or presenting. I'm on the conference planning committee, and am doing work for NCOSE, the non-profit running the conference.

Please distribute widely this information widely. General conference information is at http://www.k12openminds.org. The call for speakers information is at http://www.k12openminds.org/conference/call-for-speakers/. Sponsorship information is at http://www.k12openminds.org/sponsors.html/.

OVERVIEW

Schools around the United States and the world are discovering the benefits of Open-Source Software. In Indiana alone, over 150,000 students use Open-Source Software every day. Not only does Open-Source Software save money, it allows schools to extend essential educational software to students' homes and into after-school programs, providing extended learning opportunities at no cost.

Are you looking for ways to provide more technology with less money?
Could your teachers benefit from a Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle, Sakai)?
Do you want a solution for all of your students to access their school work from home?
Is your school community looking for ways to increase student engagement and learning?
Have you thought about developing an Open-Source Software strategy to increase technology access while controlling costs?

Join us September 25-27, 2008 in Indianapolis, Indiana for the K-12 Open Minds Conference! This is an unparalleled opportunity to talk with teachers, administrators and technology staff from around the U.S. and the world. We expect more than 600 attendees, from the US, Europe, Asia and North and South America. Dozens of sessions that address teaching and learning, leadership and technical issues related to open technologies make this conference a "must attend" event.

Teaching and Learning sessions will feature experienced teachers from around the world demonstrating successful strategies and techniques. Technology and Infrastructure sessions will feature experts from around the world on issues such as: connecting to your local Windows or Mac authentication server, managing large and small network deployments, and using interactive whiteboards in classrooms in Linux and open-source environments, and more. Additional sessions designed for Leadership and Policy will demonstrate how policy initiatives and effective strategies for using Open-Source Software help to meet your educational objectives.

Featured Speakers include:

Donna Benjamin - Executive Director of Creative Contingencies and board member of Open Source Industry Australia;
Alex Inman -- Director of Technology at Whitfield School, St. Louis, MO - an Essential School using open source;
Chris Lehman -- Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA, and;
Dr. David Thornburg - Director of Global Operations for the Thornburg Center and author of several books including, When the Best is Free.

For more information and to register go to: http://k12openminds.org A special conference hotel rate of $97 is available at the Indianapolis Downtown Marriott through Monday, August 25, 2008. After that, rates may be higher.

If you have any questions please contact me (see below) or Mike Huffman at 317.232.6672 or mhuffman@doe.in.gov

Steve Hargadon
steve@hargadon.com
www.stevehargadon.com
916-899-1400 cell

Video Conference Discussion of Content Creation Idea

2008-07-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

This great discussion (forward to 13 minutes 40 seconds) centers on some great "philosophical" questions by Caroline (?) from Scott Merrick's class that did a video interview of me this week. When is enough enough? How many social networks can there be? How do we integrate Web 2.0 into our lives? How much time will it take, and where is that time supposed to come from? Way to ask GREAT questions, Caroline!

Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0

The Solution to Content Overload: A Thought Takes Flight

2008-07-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'm intrigued at how an idea can grow, morph, and improve over time. For several months I have made the paradoxical claim that the solution to content overload is to create more content.

What I've meant by this is that the act of creating content helps to teach us how this new world of ever-increasing content works. And when we teach others to be content creators, we help them to better understand this new world so that they can be better consumers of content themselves. A good example of this is how the act of choosing a license under which to publish content gives us (and students) a better understanding of how to respect others' licensing choices.

But it turns out that I'm discovering a richer meaning to the paradoxical answer. One that I instinctively knew was there, but hadn't been able to verbalize fully until now.

I see the Web moving from a "publishing" platform to a "conversation" platform. We will drive ourselves crazy if we continue to think of the Web as an ever-growing repository of information to consume. And so within that vision it would be reasonable to ask--as many have done--why the ordinary user should add more content, much of which will be of questionable value when measure by the yardstick of authoritative voices. However, as the Web grows it is becoming less about accumulation and aggregation of content, and more and more a vehicle for participating in engaged learning conversations (both synchronous or asynchronous).

And when we teach content creation we are actually teaching the ability to take part in these conversations. And the ability to take part in these conversations, I believe, will define our learning, our careers, and our sense of personal accomplishment.