Douglas Rushkoff calls it the "Society of Authorship" this new era that we are entering, and I like that phrase a lot. But I also like Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz's description too: "The Participation Age."

The Participation Age, in which an open and competitive network fuels growing opportunities for everyone - not simply to draw data or shift work around the world, but to participate, to create value and independence. If the Information Age was passive, the Participation Age is active.

Sometimes I'm astounded, literally, by the threads that seem to keep popping up, the idea here, for instance, of independent participation to create value. It feels like a very radical idea to education. Can we get to the point where we believe our students can add value, can participate in meaningful ways even while they're still in high school (or middle school, or elementary school)? Better yet, can the mere opportunity to add value to a larger, broader body of knowledge motivate students to work with more passion and interest?

I know this harkens back to the discussion from a few days ago when Ken raised the question of just how many people would actually end up participating as opposed to staying on their keisters glued to "Survivor" or "CSI." (110 million people watch that show. Oy.) The difference is, those boob tubers never had the chance to participate. These kids do. [Weblogg-ed News]

I've seen quite a few references to James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds of late. In particular is a post by Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users that got me thinking a lot about the meaning of collaboration and the Read/Write Web. She blogged Surowiecki's presentation at ETech and sums up the premise of his talk with this quote:

"Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible."

That's the kind of statement that makes me want to read more. (My stack just keeps getting higher and higher...) Seems to me there are a lot of us teaching our kids to do just the opposite when we ask them to collaborate. We ask them to come to consensus. To negotiate a viewpoint. And we all know that in most cases, the few do the work for the many. Instead, the wisdom of the group is in the aggregated ideas and thoughts of each individual. (Anyone else's light bulbs going off?) As George Siemens says

A group following a group created ideology has the potential to be dangerous. A group of individuals following an aggregated vision is exciting.

I see this in the system of schooling as well. We have our ideologies, our vision statements, our mission. But once those are negotiated, we stop thinking about them. They're not purposeful as anything more than quotes on the letterhead. And in most instances the teachers are not truly invested in the ideology to begin with.

That's not to say that working together, sharing and discussing ideas is a bad thing. But we need to celebrate and nurture the individual ideas of our students (and our teachers) more willingly I think. We need to teach them that there are many diverse opinions and ideas out there, and that as individuals they can negotiate their own truths and bring those back to the group for further thinking. Now I know it's not a perfect comparison, but that's kinda what happens in the blog world. Certainly, we aggregate the ideas of individuals, and we don't seek consensus as much as we seek clarity in terms of what these experiences and ideas mean in our own lives. And once we come to some clear thinking on what those meanings are, we throw them back to the group and say, in essence, "so, whaddaya think?" And the process continues.

I think that this group of educators that I've found online is very smart. But we're smart because we're not looking for one answer. There are many answers, and those answers push us to more questions and more thinking, and in the end, more learning. Isn't that what we want for our students? [Weblogg-ed News]

Ok...so you're too lazy to actually go and create your own personalized search feed for New York Times content? (Go here and add source:new_york_times to your search terms. Tough, huh?) Well then this site is for you. The Annotated New York Times will supply you with hundreds of search specific feeds to Times content, including the ever popular subjects "bars," "beer" and "bombs and explosives." (I'm in a "B" mood...)

But here's the best part: you can also get an RSS feed that tracks any blogosphere references to the articles included in the search specific feeds. So, you want to see what the Times is writing about education and schools? Here's the feed. But if you also want to know what people are saying about what the Times is writing about education and schools, here's that feed.

And you can do the same with your favorite New York Times authors.

Mercy.

And don't forget that it's easy to get around that "link to a story in the NYT archives" problem. You did know that bloggers (and anyone else if they know about it) have free access to the archives, didn't you? Just take the original link and paste it into the form on the New York Times Link Generator page. It will generate (duh) a new link to the full story that you can actually view. Then, of course, you need to Furl it.

Should I be worried that this gives me chills? Amazing what we can do with information these days.

Most certainly to be added to the RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators v. 1.6... [Weblogg-ed News]

Pretty interesting article in yesterday's USA Today on the growing uses of wikis in government circles. Get this:

The communities of practice wiki is not the only one drawing federal officials' fascination. Patrick Hogan, learning technologies program manager at NASA, depends on a wiki site to program NASA software. An open-source program, NASA World Wind, lets users look at satellite imagery. They can peer into the Grand Canyon or follow the Nile River from its source, Lake Victoria, or leap over the Himalayas. Users in metropolitan areas can view street-level imagery. The program is popular, judging by the 2 million people who have downloaded it despite its 200M size.

And now those 2 million people [~] or anyone else [~] can suggest modifications to the program. A private enterprise, not affiliated with NASA, recently launched a wiki site called World Wind Central.

"These folks are not being paid by NASA at all and yet are providing a tremendous service to NASA," Hogan said. The development community has donated hundreds of hours of coding effort, including a search tool for NASA World Wind's 5 million locations and a mouse-over effect that simulates gravity's varying strength worldwide, he said. Hogan routinely participates in the wiki and thanks outside developers. He has only a handful of full- and part-time employees, so he appreciates the free labor.

Wiki life is good, eh? [Weblogg-ed News]

Read Thomas Friedman in the New York Times Magazine today and you'll get a sense of how the explosion of the Internet and Web is changing the world. Here are some snippets:

Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365.

And:

When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature.

And:

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this.

And, finally:

''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''

Friedman refers to all of this as the "flattening of the world" in the context of "Globalization 3.0," an era that began in 2000 and is quickly making the world smaller and flatter (a more level playing field) because of technology. It's an important read for anyone wanting to get a sense of our challenge.

Ironically, I'm in the middle of reading Next by Michael Lewis, and he talks about how the Read/Write Web is doing some flattening of its own. He talks about "pyramid shaped, hierarchical organizations" that have a few appointed experts that deal out relevant information (Read: Schools.) But the Web is nurturing less hierarchical, "pancake-shaped" organizations where networks allow all of the members to contribute whatever relevant information they might have. (Read: Wikipedia)

So I'm wondering...when do we start flattening our classrooms to equip our kids more realistically for the world that awaits them? [Weblogg-ed News]

Ken Smith took a few months off from posting regularly to his Weblog but he's been back lately with a vengance and we're all better for it. He's been listening to the Lawrence Lessig presentation I pointed to earlier in the week, and he refers to a quote that caught my ear as well. In talking about how the Read/Write Web changes the way we need to think about writing and content creation, Lessig says:

Anybody with a $1500 computer can take images and sounds from the culture around us and remix them to say things differently, to express ideas political, cultural, to perform creativity differently. This is a kind of writing. It expresses a certain creative potential and a certain democratic potential changing the freedom to speak by changing the power to speak. It makes this different. It produces not just a broadcast democracy but increasingly a bottom-up democracy, not just a New York Times democracy but a blog democracy, not just the few speaking to the many but increasingly peer to peer. This is the architecture of this network. It is what this network begs for, this form of creativity. (Emphasis mine)

This, of course, is the higher order line of thinking about these technologies, the idea that the ability to create content can give voice to the average man, and can therefore add depth and meaning to the conversation. (The "lower" revolves around the critical thinking, reading and writing skills that we need to employ to effectively create that content.)

But Ken asks the obvious "What if they gave a blog and nobody came?" question.

So of course we want the tools and protections for a more dynamic democracy, but I wonder if even with a thriving remix culture we don't have millions of folks sitting in front of their favorite screens in passivity and idle diversion, rather than agency. I wonder if the Read/Write web turns out to be, for many millions, little more than a Read/Enjoy web, even if its most creative participants know better and use it for much more. Put the law and the technology in order, and you still have the passivity of the culture to grapple with -- the individualism that doesn't have the skills, online or otherwise, for making community happen, or the experience and awareness that this is a desirable goal.

It's a great point, and I think if anything it articulates the challenge that we as educators and parents have in front of us. It also ties into the "what will it take to get kids to blog after the course is over?" question, which, I'm happy to say, has brought my colleague Tom McHale into the fray. (The boy needs his own blog, I'd say...)

But actually, I'm somewhat optimistic about all of this. TV time for kids has been dropping off. In many ways, kids are leading the way with these technologies, becoming more active as they create content. We have a long way to go, no doubt, in seamlessly incorporating the "blog democracy" into our teaching and our curriculum. But if I squint and look real hard into the future, I think I can see a generation that is much, much more engaged with managing and creating information. But we as educators have to lead the way. We have to articulate at every turn the fact that the Web is the "killer app," that it's only going to become more and more a part of our lives, that we need to teach the new literacies regarding the use of information and the creation of content that the Web demands.

Our kids are going to get there one way or the other, but if we educators don't take the lead on this and soon, we're going to be rendered irrelevant. As I've said before, we don't own the content any more, and what we should own, the mastery of how to use that content, is sorely lacking. Unless we become able to teach and model effective practice in short order, it will be more than passivity that we'll have to deal with. [Weblogg-ed News]

So one of the frustrations I've felt with my own practice with student Weblogs and the like is the veritable dearth of students who continue to blog after the class is over. I've always felt that for these tools to really become as powerful as they can be, they need to be integrated over the long haul, not simply used in nine or 18 week chunks for one specific class or another. Don't get me wrong, that's a start. And if all the hulabaloo over the blog banning story has shown one thing, it's that we need any and every opportunity to model a thoughtful use of blogs in the classroom.

Chris Lott has been thinking about these issues as well and has a very important post about them here.

The problem is that it takes more than one class/quarter/semester to start becoming a proficient denizen of the socially networked community. One-off uses are not enough[~]just when students are starting to make the connections themselves, and just when they are starting to have their own personal [base "]AHA![per thou] moments, the plug gets pulled and they may not encounter such an educational environment again for another term or two (or ever).

It's so true. And his thoughts on how to ameliorate this issue by incorporating blogging as a part of a richer, portfolio type tool is right on as well. Blogging in isolation is good. Blogging as a part of a more expansive, more integrated environment that brings all the pieces of learning together in one place is much better. [Weblogg-ed News]

(Via James, who has much to say on this as well...) This piece by Ulises Mejias takes a look at the writing process in wikis as a way to understand the need for what he calls a "social literacy" now needed when tackling collaborative writing spaces.

Thus, social literacy...does not refer to the skills necessary to perform in society, but to the use of the resource of writing in social contexts. Social literacy amounts to the textual practices not (as has been true so far) of a single author, but of multiple and simultaneous authors. Wikis make social literacy apparent by allowing us to witness the evolution of text in time, and evolution that reflects the decisions not of a single individual, but of a community.

In keeping the focus on literacy in the context of writing, this post does much to identify the ways in which we are going to need to prepare students for the negotiation of content and style that is going to be required to navigate these collaborative spaces. And there is much to say about the educational benefits of using wikispace to create content, but not to use it as a discussion space.

There are plenty of other online tools better equipped to support an Initiation-Reply mode of conversation (such as discussion boards for collective dialogue, or blogs and email for more individualized forms of exchange). If appropriate, these tools can be used in conjunction with wikis. But the whole point of wikis is to de-prioritize the individual voice in favor of the collective voice, which dictates the structure and content of the text. This, of course, is a literacy which most individuals in our societies are unaccustomed to. Which is why scaffolding wikis with other technologies that support more traditional forms of communication might be an adequate strategy.

Worth wrapping your brain around if you're trying to find some context for wikis in your practice... [Weblogg-ed News]

I'm still a little peeved at that Vermont school principal who says that blogging is not an educational activity. It's just such an uninformed statement that I hope it's a misquote. I'd bet the farm he's never blogged, never commented, never even read a well designed classroom blog. Instead it's a knee jerk, blanket assumption drawn from the bad habits of a few kids who have not been taught to do better. And there is enough blame for that to go around. But don't blame the blogs. The fact is, Myspace is less a Weblog site than it is a community of adolescents making a lot of sexual innuendo who love the color pink. (I can't even figure out how to post an entry to the account I just created there.) It's journaling, flirting, posing...none of which comes close to what it means to blog.

What's doubly ironic is that there is less and less doubt that writing ability is among the top factors in predicting a student's success in college and afterward. To improve your writing ability you need to write consistently for real audiences. No tool that I know of does that better than Weblogs. In addition, bloggers improve their reading and critical thinking skills and become more information literate in the process. Blogging is most definitely an educational activity.

Blogs are getting a bad name in educational circles because those who disparage them think sites like Myspaces are representative of the technology and aren't taking the time to understand their potential. We need to make the case more clearly that a) much of what is happening in these online writing spaces is clearly not best practice, but that b) best practices and real learning can occur when employed by teachers and students who have embraced blogging (v) and, finally, that we can c) keep our kids safe by practicing common sense, modeling appropriate use, and making sure our students understand the rules of the road. [Weblogg-ed News]

Just a quick pointer to newly posted version 1.5 of the RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators. It adds some new information on Furl and del.icio.us feeds, begins a list of cool uses for RSS, and fixes some broken links. At last count, the guide has been downloaded over 2,500 times...Cool! Please let me know if you see any corrections or have any additions to suggest.

Enjoy! [Weblogg-ed News]

So I've been seeing this link to amaztype for a few days and finally decided to have a look at the results for a "blog" search on Amazon. Sheesh! There are dozens of blog related books out there suddenly. Who knew?

Like Road Blog:

When the Websters leave Normal, Illinois, for a family holiday, Austin and Ashley get pulled right back into the World Wide Web[^]and this time, Mr. and Mrs. Webster get sucked inside the Internet, too! What began as a relaxing getaway turns into a wacky road trip when they set out to find Lost Lake Resort. Soon, the Websters are stumbling through a long lineup of lost links, like LostKitty-dot-com, the Lost Sea cave, a long-lost Inca city, and a lost round-the-world flight.

Or The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez:

Twelve-year-old Raisin Rodriguez has been uprooted from her life in California and plopped down in Philadelphia with her mother, sister, step-father, step-sister Samantha, and Samantha's cross-dressing poodle Countess. The only way Raisin can survive the painful transition is by recording every detail in a secret blog she keeps for her best friends from home.

Wow! And how about Baghdad Burning : Girl Blog from Iraq:

In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events.

And, ahem, China, the Sexiest Country on Earth: Blogs of China Business & Life:

Our blog contributors lift the veil of mystery shrouding China ...who you meet (students, secretaries and staff) ...starting from zero ...the wrong freedoms ...takeaways (top ten MBA rules to break, top ten business rules to follow, top ten China/USA contradictions, top ten China/USA similarities, top ten adjectives Chinese use to describe Americans). China will be 'on top of us [U.S.]' sooner than anyone expects. Similar to the 1980's economic 'invasion' by the Japanese, the impact of China's economic penetration will erupt unexpected, unforeseen and overnight.

Mercy. And let's not stop there. Looks what's on the horizon: Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds In Action:

An innovator's guide to application development with blog, wiki, and newsfeed technologies, this book introduces the new ways of collaboration enabled by these technologies and focuses on the fundamental concepts needed to understand how the technologies can be used in real world applications.

"Holy Spimoli!" as my grandfather used to say. It's a veritable feast of blog books. Hmmm... [Weblogg-ed News]

Holographic media will get an airing next week in Las Vegas, as InPhase Technologies promises a demonstration of its first prototype system. [Extremetech]