A View From the Schoolhouse
Marcie and I will be presenting at NECC! Our proposal, Starting From Scratch: Building School 2.0 has been accepted. Because the NYC school year ended so late, I never got to attend NECC, so this will be my first time at the biggest educational technology conference in the US. Just looking at some of the folks presenting… it’s going to be an amazing conference. We’ll have just finished up our first year, and we should have a wonderful — and interesting — story to tell.
Technorati tag: necc07
Will Richardson writes today about the difference between having a blog and "blogging." He writes:
Ok, so heres my beef, again. Blogs are powerful communication tools. Blogs are powerful publishing tools. But blogging (the verb) is still much more than that to me. Blogging, as in reading and thinking and reflecting and then writing, is connecting and learning, neither of which are discussed in the article. (And maybe they werent meant to be, I know) Im not knocking what Tim or his teachers are doing, I think its great. But Im just asking the question: how are his teachers modeling the use of blogs to learn not just to teach?
And I agree. A blog is a web page that’s easy to publish. But that’s not blogging. I tend to look at my own blogging here, and I get frustrated when I see too many quicky posts in a row that toss out an idea without exploring it in any kind of depth. Blogging for me has to be about reflective practice.
It’s about putting ideas out there, exploring them, sharing them, and taking part in a larger community. Sometimes, yes, it’s just about an announcement or two, but at its best, my blogging helps me think, brings others into my thought process and improves it because of their input and forces me to make sense of my thoughts — which is why it’s so damned hard sometimes.
Blogs make publishing easier, but having something to say is still hard. But if we can model reflective practice, if we can embody the old Socratic ideal that "the unexamined life is not worth living," if we can publicly create communities where thoughtfulness — truly being full of thought — then we have accomplished something powerful.
And hey, we can always post the daily announcements and homework assignments later.
One of the true visionaries in both the computing and the educational technology community, Seymour Papert is in critical condition after being struck by a motorbike. Papert invented Logo which turned millions of kids onto programming. He was one of the proponents of Constructionist learning, which has a powerful influence on SLA and all of the project-based learning folks, and lately, he’s been a consultant on the One Laptop Per Child project.
For more information about Seymour Papert, I encourage you to read Andy Carvin’s Prayers for Seymour Papert post. And I’d like to add my prayers to the mix as well.