NECC: A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything

Will Richardson
weblogg-ed.com
weblogged@gmail.com
http://webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com

**Edit: I forgot to mention one of the more telling things to come from Will's session. He asked at the beginning if anyone was blogging his session. About 25 hands went up. Astounding. **

This is a changed world ... and it's not about the technology. (finally!!!) It's about imagination ...(it's about conversation; it's about community)

He tells story of blogger who trades One Red Paper Clip
also tells story of anime music video mashups -- another example of imagination

Imagination: "The ability to confront and deal with reality by using the creative power of the mind."

These days reality = web

The emerging reality > the read/write web or web 2.0 -- the ability to produce as well as consume information

we are at a turning point in the tech industry, and perhaps even in the history of the world (Tim O'Reilly)

7 million new web pages every day. 70,000 new blogs every day. 2.7 billion links every day.

From linking pages ... to linking ideas (web 2.0)

linking to conversations ... linking to people

Society of authorship
age of participation
era of collaboration
a society of "uploaders" (tom friedman)

an active, participatory web = read/write web

"We do not realize how significant the read-write internet could be.: Lawrence Lessig

For educators (and this is why we're here):
69,000 education blogs (joanne jacobs)
25+ million kids creating content online (new york times) ... and they are creating all sorts of stuff ... some good; some terrible
(e.g., MatthewBischoff.com -- "13 yr-old podcasting from my bedroom")

Gives example of his daughter's (Tess's) flickr site ... that teaches about how to make weather objects (tornados) More than 1000 people have visited her weather book at flickr.com

"Don't just give it to me. Teach others around the world with what you've learned."

"now that we have podcasting and blogging anyone can do it. you don't need to some rich person in new york, you can produce from your own
home." (student comment)

it's about thinking, literally. out of the box for our classrooms.

big changes for schools
1. web 2.0 changes classrooms

• from classes in straight rows to MIT Open Courseware -- free courses from MIT. now classroom is literally anywhere i have access (including access to a video of every lecture in a given course.
• from "do your own work" to "work with others"
• wikipedia perfect example of this
• from collaborate with our peers to collaborate around the world

2. the web changes texts

• we can create our own
• "Rip, Mix and Learn"

3. The web changes teaching

• teacher as connector
• 1 billion people online -- think of the potential number of teachers out there
• when his class read The Secret Life of Bees, he created a blog/discussion area for the book for his students and invited the author to participate. She did! and answered 10 questions submitted from his students in a 2700 word response. in fact, this blog site comes up first in google when searching the title.

4. the web changes learning

• learn anything anywhere anytime -- U-Learning.
• "Ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate." (Mark Federman)
• The learner decides what, when, where, and how she learns
• the most important thing we can teach our kids is not content -- it's how to learn
• from just in case learning to just in time learning
• Nomadic learning
• "learning networks based on meaning not proximity" (stephen downes)
• learning is a social process (list of social networking sites on wikipedia)
  people want to learn in social ways

5. the web changes curriculum

• because it changes the audience
• from "hand it in" to "publish it"
• students can teach.
• itunes k-12 podcasts (100s of them now)
• audio, video, text

6. the web changes literacy

• we teach kids how to read books. do we teach them how to read posts on wikipedia (such as the post on the Battle of Gettysburg)
• On the net, documents/pages get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to." (David Weinberger)
• If you can't decipher who wrote what on the web ... you are not literate today. if we aren't teaching our kids this, we are failing them.
• working in distributed, collaborative environments (jill walker)

7. The web changes computing

• the web as the platform (writely, google spreadsheets, wikipedia)
• to what extent do these changes demand we rethink our curriculum?
• what needs to change when our students can publish to audience far beyond our classrooms .. when they themselves can teach?
• how does a teacher's role change when we can bring primary source into the classroom?
• how do we define literacy in a whorl where we must no only not how to read and write but also to create, produce, and publish?
• we need to teach myspace, not ignore, not ban it, not pretend it doesn't exist

"Change is inconvenient" -- Al Gore
The inconvenient truth on education
30% of 9th graders don't graduate in 4 years
we take the tools they use out of their hands when they come in the school doors

great session. when i find the link to the podcast of this session i'll link to it here. Everyone who reads this posts should take the time to commit to listening to this session from Will himself. It's worth the effort. And if i can find the ppt he uses (Lawrence Lessig, minimalist style used very effectively)

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