During one of our teacher's presentations to the Grade 7s on the new Edublogs-based e-portfolios, one student whips out her iPhone a catches all the details on video.

Smart.

No one promted her. It's the way she works.

It's the iGen, the 12-and-under kids, who are going to rock education.

A few years ago I heard Columbia University professor, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/fac_profiles.htm), give a keynote at a conference on the Humanities I was attending. The modern world needs a
Common tongue, she said, and it might as well be English. The trick, she cautioned, is to have everyone learn English without losing the mother tongue. There is deep meaning in words and the structure of languages. They each reveal a different and important view of the human experience. We all lose when a language dies.

Thanks again Kotke: http://kottke.org/11/07/keeping-language-alive-through-texting

The raw notes from my conversation with @prawsthorne We were talking about how to make emerging web technologies fit into a school in a way that made sense, from top to bottom, and that allowed for sustained and sensible growth. Details on each part of the discussion to follow.

I've set up a reading group on the Canadian Association of Independent School's Ning where we can have a go at Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology. I've read it before and think that whether you agree or disagree with Heidegger, he will get you thinking about technology in new ways. But, he is a difficult read; his writing is obscure, elliptical and dense, so I'd welcome another go, especially with others off whom I can bounce ideas. Membership is open to anyone with a Ning account. We're just getting the group together now, so the reading schedule hasn't been set up yet. I'll post a note here when we're ready to get going.

Mark Twain And I want them back, thank you very much.

Everything has been thought of before; the task is to remember it again.

Suppose Goethe is right: What do we learn about teaching and curriculum by looking backward, instead of forward?

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, writes on the ideologically loaded term, "intellectual property" and says You Can't Own Knowledge:

[...] "intellectual property" is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are troublesome at the best of times, but they're deadly to any country trying to make a transition to a "knowledge economy."

The other pieces in Japanese activist, entreprenneur and CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito's book are equally engaging and, properly, available online at FreeSouls. I wonder, however, even if knowledge becomes freely available and abundant in a sort of Locke-ian commons, will we run into issues over who owns and controls access to that knowledge? Computers, mobile phones, ISPs, data plans all cost money--a lot of money.

There's some interesting data, something we're short on in the discussion of Learning 2.0, on Paul Bogush's nearly eponymously-named blog, Blogush. Bogush, an 8th grade teacher in Connecticut, asked his students to comment on how blogging for a world-wide audience over the past two months has changed the way they write. Most of the students, whose responses Bogush has faithfully recorded for us, said something like this one did:

Knowing that the whole world is able to see what I’m writing makes me think twice about putting something up there. It makes me check my work more carefully and it motivates me to do my best work.

Or these ones:

It makes me want to do my very best. I realize that some of our cutoms are much different than in other parts of the world, so i try not to be blunt when i am explaining things.

Bogush clearly has his kids motivated; they rock, as he says. But, as I commented on his site, I wonder what does it say about schools that students don’t care about how well they write until they know they’re writing for a blog-sized audience? Could it be that students think that school is not the real world, so to speak, and so they say–maybe rightly–who cares? Does connecting and collaborating make learning real? I know my own students are fired up by their WikiEducator project, which is similar insofar as they are writing for a world-wide audience. Or does Bogush make writing real, if that is indeed the reason his students have taken up the pen? A teacher's job is make an education real or relevant for students. I don't mean relevant in the sense that the thing in question will secure a job, or entrance into univeristy or help balance a checkbook. I mean that students, especially young adolescents like Bogush's grade 8s, are full of questions about the nature of knowledge, justice, ethics, society and themselves. "Who am I?" and "What I am I supposed to be doing here?" are the sorts of questions my students are asking. A good teacher, like Bogush maybe, will show them how being a careful writer--or careful reader, speaker, mathematician and so on--will help them explore possible answers in a meaningful way.

This slide was posted by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on the excellent blog, Dangerously Irrelevant. The two statements in the slide ought to be obvious; and it ought to be obvious that they have been forever true. This is because technology is always new, which is the same thing as saying it's nothing new. James Pillans' blackboard and chalk were cutting edge educational tech when he introduced those in the classroom in the early 19th century. "The inventor of [this] system," one Josiah Bumstead said, "deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind." The more interesting thing raised here is that no one has said enough yet about what "effective" means, (or about why we would want students to connect and collaborate online). My hunch is that it doesn't mean anything different than it did in Pillans' day. You may have seen this video, but the last 30 or 40 seconds makes a point relevant here and is worth another look if you have: