Dangerously Irrelevant

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

What social networks do I belong to? Let me see…

MySpace. Ning Classroom 2.0. Facebook. Ning EdubloggerWorld. LinkedIn. Ning Stop Cyberbullying. The blogosphere. The Did You Know? 2.0 wiki community. And my burgeoning list of Twitter friends. And the folks in my Skype and other instant messaging networks. And also my only-sometimes-electronic personal and professional networks: other professors, principals, superintendents, technology coordinators, assessment coordinators, former students, friends, family. And so on… (do listservs count? Second Life? my classes in WebCT?)

A few things are becoming clear to me about all of this social networking that is occurring:

1. I don’t have time to do much of it. I see the active Twittering that’s going on, the vibrant dialogues occurring in Ning, the questions that others are asking and answering in Facebook. I’m already exhausted trying to balance everything. I can’t keep up with the reading, not to mention the posting and participating. I’ve essentially chosen e-mail, the blogosphere, and live people over more formalized social networking and instant messaging tools. Maybe I’m starting to become one of those antiquated old fogies that the young whippersnappers complain about… (Q: if I have a bunch of social networking “friends” but never participate, does that make me “antisocial?”)
2. I spend more time in the networks that push notifications out to me via e-mail or my RSS aggregator. I’d likely be more active in Facebook, for example, if I could subscribe to all of its functionality rather than having to remember to go visit.
3. I agree with Wired.
4. We need to be sure that one of the 21st century skills students learn is “navigating and managing multiple, potentially overlapping, worldwide social networks” (or something like that).
5. As some of us encourage educators to dive into social networking, it behooves us to explicitly acknowledge the challenges of time management, multiple network management, etc. It’s not all glam and glitz.
6. There are a lot of social networks out there. Some of them are a little lame (wait a minute! I belong to one of these!).
7. Right now RSS is the key. Services like Feedburner’s subscribe via e-mail are stopgaps to bridge old technologies with the new.
8. Maybe I need a dedicated widescreen social networking monitor, one that I just load up with open social networking, IM, RSS, Twitter, and e-mail windows. That way I’ll never miss a beat (and also never get anything else done).

I need to get over my worry that I’m going to miss something. I’m saying no to the next social network invitation I get. I don’t care if it’s the “People who want to give Scott McLeod a million dollars” network. Sorry. My brain is full.

P.S. #4 is really important.

In honor of the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa, here is the checklist I posted last year at this time. Hmmm… I wonder if schools have made any improvements on this list over the past year?

A video of prison inmates in the Philippines remaking Michael Jackson’s Thriller is a big hit on YouTube. As is typical, the rebuttal is getting much less attention.

The truth is somewhere in all of this, although as an outsider I can hardly presume to know what it is. But this much is certain: these two videos certainly highlight yet again the importance of media and information literacy.

Karl Fisch just sent me a link to this video. If you watch the first 10 minutes or so, you’ll see Hal Lindsey of the Trinity Broadcasting Network use Did You Know? (Jeff Brenman’s adaptation of the original version) as an indicator that Armageddon is near.

Oh, and if you like the video, you can order it on DVD at 1-800-Titus35.

I don’t know how Will Richardson came across these pictures of the Detroit Public School Book Depository, but I can’t get them out of my head so I’m sharing them here. [click on each image for a larger version]

As a former urban educator, these pictures really speak to me because they’re photographic metaphors for the decay and rot that we have allowed to take hold in our largest urban school systems. Detroit. Chicago. New York. St. Louis. Houston. Miami. Philadelphia. Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. And so on… They all have wonderful schools, but they also have dozens/hundreds of schools that would make you weep if your child had to attend them.

Where is our moral shame? Where is our humanity?

Many gaming-savvy teenagers and adults create modifications, or mods, of the video games that they play. By doing this, they transcend from mere players into virtual world creators. Conceptualizing, designing, building, testing, revising – these are all complex cognitive skills that go far beyond the relatively simplistic skills required by many educational software programs.

So I was delighted to see my 2nd-grade son and 4th-grade daughter breathlessly rush up to me today to show me the levels that they created for their newest Nintendo DS game, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis. At ages 7 and 9, they’re already engaging in complex world creation on their little Nintendo just like they can with SimCity, The Sims, Zoo Tycoon, and RollerCoaster Tycoon. Best of all, they are finding that creating new worlds may be more fun than just playing the game.

Elementary kids as world builders. Very cool…

[image credit: http://tinyurl.com/282woz]

Has it been a whole year already? Today Dangerously Irrelevant is one year old!

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Two weeks ago I reported on my second effort to catalog the edublogosphere, to put some shape and form to the amorphous network, to try and measure the largely unmeasurable. Some of my blogging colleagues raised various concerns and objections. Here’s my take…

1. As is described quite clearly (and eloquently) in Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, the Internet and the education blogosphere are both examples of complex, self-organizing networks. As such, they have multiple hubs of varying sizes, each connected to each other and to multiple individual nodes (i.e., blogs and web sites). [click on image for larger version]
   
   Some hubs are connected to thousands of other hubs and nodes; we might call these superhubs (e.g., A-D). Other hubs (e.g., E-H) are connected to less than a dozen nodes. The key here is that many nodes never would come into contact each other except for the hubs. For example, edublogger 1 only finds out about edublogger 2 because edublogger A highlighted and linked to something edublogger B wrote about edublogger 2’s post.
2. The hubs and superhubs are the essential connectors, the glue that holds the network together. For example, if edublogger 2 quits blogging, the only one that loses access to that voice is edublogger B. If edublogger C stops blogging, however, the rest of the network not only loses access to that person’s voice, it also loses access to the voices of those edubloggers to which only C linked. If edublogger A quits blogging, the network loses access to edubloggers E and F as well as all of the individual edubloggers to which only they were connected (at least until those nodes get reconnected to other hubs). The process is all very fluid, shifting and changing with each hyperlink.
3. There are advantages to being first, but over time quality wins out. One of the reasons that edubloggers like Will Richardson and David Warlick are superhubs is because they were some of the first ones in the education blogosphere. They had first-mover advantage and have had time to build up their audience compared to the new edublogger who started yesterday. That said, over time their advantage begins to diminish as others enter the network. If Will and David’s posts didn’t continue to be of high quality, people would link to other bloggers instead and Will and David’s audiences would dwindle. Hubs and superhubs must have ‘sticky’ content in order to retain their roles in the network. It’s a testimony to many of the top edubloggers that they’ve been able to be consistently good, as defined by their audiences, for a long period of time.
4. If you are interested in making change, the hubs and superhubs have important roles to play. Why? Because they’re the ones with the ability to reach many. They’re also the ones with the ability to bring important ideas generated out on the fringes of the network into the mainstream center of the network.

So, in response to some of the objections…

• It’s not just an issue of ‘popularity.’ Because we voluntarily visit / subscribe to blogs, content wins out over superficiality in the end. High-ranking blogs are there because others value their voices. You may not think an individual blogger is interesting, but others often do in large numbers. So Terry Freedman says, “Quality not quantity.” And Vicki Davis says “meaningful” is more important than “popular.” But as item 3 above notes, these supposed dichotomies actually are conflated.
• I see knowledge and identification of the hubs and superhubs as important for facilitating change. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach advocates focusing on impact, not just ranking. To me, impact and ranking tend to blur since I think about large-scale, comprehensive reform of schools, not just localized change. Most of us are change agents – whether our agenda is K-12 technology, home schooling, back-to-basics education, or whatever – but it’s hard to make change when no one is listening. If I want to influence the educational technology arena, I need to catch the attention of folks like Will and David and Sheryl and Terry and Vicki and also be able to point educators to them. If I want to influence the homeschooling arena, I need to catch the eye of SpunkyHomeSchool. And so, again, I believe that impact and ranking are somewhat intertwined.
• Each of us has our own reason(s) for blogging, and of course we always must respect those. I would never presume to either guess others’ reasons or judge the legitimacy of those motivations.
• Maybe it’s the academic in me, but I think there is worth in someone doing a systematic study of the education blogosphere. It doesn’t have to be me, but someone ought to be able to cite some basic statistics about what’s going on. For example, those of us who advocate educational blogging gain legitimacy from the fact that we know that there are 50,000+ education blogs rather than just a few hundred. In other words, we have the numbers to show that educational blogging is not a fad; whatever form it takes down the road, it’s here to stay. I also don’t know how else to identify the hubs and superhubs other than to do what we did. Although we may have missed some blogs with smaller audiences, I’m fairly confident that we got all the big ones (maybe not in the right ranking order).
• I personally feel that there is no better way to recognize and honor voice than to share new and powerful voices with others. When I see interesting, illuminating writing, I want to share that with others and to do my part to help those writers gain large audiences. Sheryl said “What is important is giving our students and teachers ‘voice.’ We need to focus on helping them develop as communicators and writers, not rankers, so they have a place at the policy table and can help to leave this world better than we found it.” I concur, but I disagree that ranking is unimportant. If we want students and educators to ‘have a place at the policy table,’ the inherent nature of a complex, self-organizing network almost demands that those folks become a hub or superhub in order to gain the attention of policymakers. Policymakers rarely, if ever, listen to folks who represent small constituencies, so the larger the audience we can give powerful bloggers, the better.
• I could have listed just the top few dozen edubloggers in my results, but I didn’t. Instead, I included every single URL that we found so that others could find new voices and bring them to the attention of the hubs and superhubs. I will continue to do this and encourage others to do the same. Indeed, illustrating that perhaps I was deeper in the ‘echo chamber than I suspected, I found some new hubs and superhubs that I didn’t even know existed (for example, how many ed tech bloggers knew about The Panda’s Thumb or Classical School Blog or that they were reaching large audiences?).
• Terry is right: Technorati has many issues. But until someone points me to something better, that’s the best I have. I, too, am somewhat confused by the different rankings that occur when different URLs are used for the same blog, but I don’t know what to do other than to provide an online form that people can use to fix or include their URL for next time.

So with all due respect, Vicki, Sheryl, and Terry, I understand and respect your perspectives but I don’t share them, at least not on this front. As always, I appreciate everyone’s input and welcome further suggestions for how to improve this ongoing project. Many thanks…

Chris Craft has posted an
interesting scenario
about the potential legal liability of using Slideshare, or any
non-district-sponsored web service, that has advertisements that may be
inappropriate for school-age children.

I will first offer my typical caveats that

1. I am not in an attorney-client relationship with anyone reading this;
2. Although I’m pretty sure that I’m correct, you rely on my opinions at your
   legal risk; and
3. I always encourage educators to consult with their local school
   organization’s attorney about any legal questions that they may have.

That said, here are my thoughts…

It seems to me that Chris’ practice of embedding his Slideshare presentations within his
district-sponsored Moodle system, combined with his district’s blocking of
Slideshare, should be enough to protect him from claims that he negligently
exposed children to inappropriate Web content. He’s not sending students to the
Slideshare site directly. In fact, his district is blocking students’ ability to
do so. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that Chris could be liable for
students accessing the site from home. That would sort of be like trying to hold
Chris accountable when a student used Google at home to look up inappropriate images
just because the student also used Google at school (where access to such images
was blocked).

If he wanted, Chris might be able to strengthen his case by including an
explicit notice that he and the school have provided safeguards against access
to inappropriate content, that students should access school-related content
only within those safeguards, and that he and the school are not liable for
students’ deliberately bypassing those safeguards at home. Such a notice could
be on his Moodle site, in a note sent home to parents, part of the
student-signed acceptable use policy (see, e.g., a model AUP from the Indiana
Department of Education), or all three. Another potential safeguard might be
a popup window that appeared whenever a student clicked on a link to an external
site. The text in the window could note that the student was leaving the
district web environment and disclaim liability for any further actions by the
student on other web sites.

The essence of negligence
is whether educators acted reasonably under the circumstances. Given the
safeguards already in place and maybe the additional ones that I’ve briefly described,
I think Chris is probably okay when the situation is viewed in its totality.
It’s one thing to hold him and his school liable for a direct link to
inappropriate content. The further away from direct linking a student gets (2
links? 5 links? 10 links?), the less likely a court would be to hold Chris and
the school responsible. There’s no bright line here, but ‘reasonable
conduct’ should win the day…

I’ve been tagged by several people to participate in the 8 Random
Things meme. I usually don’t post about personal stuff on this blog, but
given that my last
post opened me up a bit, here goes…

1. Superman : Kryptonite. Me : birthday cake or Dove dark chocolate.
2. I spent four summers working at Camp Nock-A-Mixon, a summer camp for
   wealthy Jewish kids from New York, New Jersey, and Philly, the last three
   supervising five bunks of 6– to 9–year-olds. It was a fantastic experience where
   I learned that even the well-to-do have issues, fell in love with bagels and
   lox, and picked up a little Yiddish.
3. I was the first untenured professor in the University of Minnesota College
   of Education and Human Development to ever win the college’s Distinguished
   Teaching Award. I’m pretty proud of that one.
4. I’m the only member of my immediate family that swims more like a rock than
   a fish.
5. My three favorite books of all time may be Ender’s Game, The Dragonbone
   Chair, and Beyond Discipline:
   From Compliance to Community (the latter should be required reading for
   every educator across the globe). I’ll read anything I can find by Orson Scott
   Card, Tad Williams, Alfie Kohn, Jonathan Kozol, George R.R. Martin, or Richard
   Florida.
6. I think The College of William & Mary might the greatest place in the world to spend your undergraduate years.
7. I’m a big fan of indoors. Outside has allergies, heat, dirt, bugs, etc. If I were a character on Little House on the Prairie, I’d be the sickly kid in the back room that was the shame of my parents and died at age 7.
8. When I was 10 my dad thought it would be cool to buy me a tarantula. I would
   lie awake for hours every night, afraid that if I fell asleep it would get out
   and I would wake up to find it crawling up my chest toward my face.
   Aaahhhhh!

Here are
another 5 random things if you’re interested. Seems like this is a recurring meme. I’ll
look forward to the next one (4 random things? 10 random things?).