Thing 23

The material that I have covered over the last ten weeks has helped me focus my thoughts on the most effective ways of sharing Web 2.0 tools with students and faculty in order to create a collaborative and conversant community. I appreciate the flexibility of digital texts and the simplicity with which most can be communicated nearly instantaneously. There are of course inherent dangers in un-mediated communication as anyone who has ever sent an impusive email no doubt has discovered. I am somewhat anxious about the disrupted rhetorics and governance to which Dr. Welsh alludes in the final video and definitely feel that the only hope of privacy in a Web 2.0 universe is to bury oneself in the crowd. This will lead to myriad blogs this year that are vaguely familiar (nearly all narcissistic and nearly all trite). The blog becomes the medium and the message, and the blogger one of many mouthpieces for the spirit of a digital age. As we have witnessed in the fractious debate over health care, our social mobs are riotous whether they meet in person or online. In education, we hope that we can teach digital citizenship that will temper the passion of zealots and awaken the virtue of the silent. There are too many opportunities for cowardice in a virtual world. Something about the screen allows our children to bully and demean each other in a way they rarely would do in person. There are too many false heroes in a virtual world. Our students succumb inevitably to the temptation of borrowing/stealing the work of others in order to appear brighter than they really are. I think this particular danger should inspire us to design online tasks that reward authenticity and that validate creativity. My generation (Xers) was probably the last of the rote learners and possibly the last to share a common cultural language. The future belongs to a generation that must learn to speak in their First lives as impressively as they do in their Second Life, across cultures. My plan is to continue to invite students to connect who they are to what they do. Integrity must be critical element in every assignment so that it becomes a shared expectation and practiced habit. My big takeaway from this exercise is a renewed sense that teachers , guides and coaches are needed more than ever in increasingly adult-free spaces so that learners might find models for lifelong learning on the razors' edge of the digital revolution. Web 2.0 edges are sharp, but democracy and culture hang in the balance. What is currently being negotiated in our schools is not so much the tool we shall choose to inscribe our history but the language with which we will articulate our realistic hopes.

Thing 22

Last spring our library was awarded one of the Picturing America grants from NEH and I had the pleasure of attending a summer workshop in Boston hosted by Primary Source on the "democratic vistas" of American realism. We were tasked with developing lesson plans that could be shared with other educators about at least one painting in the collection and one theme relevant to our students. I chose to explore further the Rowing Pictures of Thomas Eakins. Thing 22 motivated me to think of different ways of sharing this information. We have to submit a 5 page paper that I suspect some truly dedicated faculty will find on the NEH pages. A wiki, by contrast, is quick and very public way of engaging your peers in a conversation about best practices. I have started working on http://eakins.wikispaces.com/ and expect to spend the next month adding better links and more interactive widgets for faculty to explore as they consider the contribution that Eakins made to our our shared appreciation of amateur sports. I expect that the final product will be organized around three central questions: 1) what is a sport? 2) who is an athlete? and 3) how can you tell an amateur from a professional? At present the Navigation menu on the left hand side only lists home, Introduction to Thomas Eakins and Resources as place holders. A wiki fundamentally differs from a blog in this respect: thise who consult the wiki will likely share 1) an affinity for the subject matter, 2) a controlled vocabulary and 3) an expectation that the subject matter rather than the wiki author is central. With blogs (this one is no exception), I often get the sense that one voice dominates. With a wiki, I will strive to contribute to an apen discussion where many people share authority of experience and may contribute useful resources and insights. I think that a wiki is most appropriate for collaborative curricular projects and that a blog supports journaling and introspection.

Thing 21

I enjoyed Westmont Wiki https://westmontwiki.wikispaces.com/
I particularly like the librarian's use of Glogster to enhance navigation on the home page. It offers a visually appealing way of promoting information literacy. I enjoyed the fact that the act of pointing the cursor to a subject heading leads to that heading being circled. I also appreciated the fact that every page has a table of contents that allows the user to quickly drill down into an area of interest. For example, on the "Parent and Family Resources" page, parents can use the table of contents to explore "safety on the internet" without having to scroll through several dozen links. I also like the fact several teacher wikis are linked on the westmont wiki which promotes collegiality and offers a one stop shop for parents and students. The "Special Needs" resources ensure that all constituencies at Westmont are well served. Finally, I applaud Ms Houle for updating links on a regular basis. I noticed that the "News and Media Resources" links had been updated well into the end of the school year (May 2009). Keeping a wiki current has to be the greatest challenge of all. In order to remove this hurdle, I would seek out colleagues to help me edit and update a school library wiki. This summer I used wikispaces to create a wiki to support summer reading. It would have been far more effective and comprehensive if I had created a space for other teachers to share their insights about the required reading. This of course would require relinquishing some control over "my space" but I believe that it would benefit our students and create an interactive and conversant community of devoted readers.

Thing 20

I used EPN to locate the Genocide Prevention Network to which I subscribed. This year we are hosing Immacule Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide. She will be addressing our faculty and students in early February during Catholic Schools Week. I expect tp use this podcast to help our community prepare for her visit by becoming better versed in the political and economic factors at stake in the Darfur tragedy. Most of our students will be able to subscribe to the podcast on their iPhones and to play episodes in the car on the way to school or to a game (two out of every three of our students are athletes).
I used Podcast Alley to locate World Vision Report with Peggy Wehmeyer whom I respect greatly for her clear and candid way of reporting on religion. For our students at a Catholic school, a podcast such as this is invaluable. The Genocide Prevention Network podcast will give them a sense of the scope of the evil that men can do. The World Vision Report will affirm the power of Gospel inspired concerted collective social action.
I preferred EPN to Podcast Alley because I had to sift through three pages of News and Politics podcasts to locate World Vision Report (which I recognized because I was familiar with World Vision. The details section did not make clear the context for these gripping reports from the developing world) . I preferred Bloglines as my aggregator to iTunes because it made sense to keep track of the new episodes as part of a news folder where I get my Reuters feeds.

Thing 19

I enjoy NPR podcasts because they allow me to keep up with some of my favorite shows. Two of my favorites are Talk of the Nation http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5 and All Songs Considered http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510019
While discussions can sometimes be heated on Talk of the Nation, I think that my students would benefit from hearing mostly informed adults disagree on matters of public policy in a generally civil tone. I think that students who only get their news from cable tend to imbibe extreme language like mother's milk and often fail to listen charitably to different points of view. I can imagine using All Songs considered to discourage piracy and file sharing because so many indie tracks are available and so many interviews with up and coming artists. In my experience, students are less likely to cheat an artists of their derserved royalties if they have heard their life story and hear them sing in studio. My students tend to excuse piracy when they believe that multinational conglomerates are charging usurious prices or unnecessarily complicating their ability to share the tunes with their friends (DRM). So both podcasts would be used to teach good digital citizenship.

Thing 18

(Schools out). Personal Learning Environments - what they are and why they might be useful

View more documents from GrahamAttwell.

I added this presentation because it touches on the potential of social media in shaping new and more engaging pedagogies. I like thew comic book format and the audio track that accompanies the slides. If we are serious about lifelong learning, I think Atwell's "personal learning environments" will lead the way. If learners develop their own networks and their own communities of practice, a more authentic approach to turning data into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. The promise, as Atwell correctly states, is that every learner will articulate their voice over a lifetime of exploration and discovery. The danger remains that learners will only pursue the questions that feel safe and opinions that are consonant with their own. "Personal learning environments" have to challenge accepted truths and trigger some cognitive dissonance if learners are to grow in their understanding , empathy and experience. Otherwise, we will have parallel narcissistic, self-referential universes where learners reinforce prejudice and initial perception ( otherwise known as Facebook) or public confessionals inundated with pithy inappropriate self-disclosure (otherwise known as Twitter).

Slideshare could be a useful tool for bringing to fruition Atwell's vision of "personal learning environments". To adequately address the dangers that I named in the preceding paragraph, I believe that "slideshare communities" must be formed around essential questions and a more formal process for encouraging communities of practice should be instituted. As subscribers create their profiles, certain keywords should trigger invitations to join like-minded learners in exploration of key concepts and an invitation to enter into civil debate with someone with a differing worldview. For example a slideshare presentation on "Intelligent Design" should trigger invitations to join Darwinists and creationists in conversation. In the classroom, teachers would ensure diversity of opinions. Outside of school, individuals would have to model the intellectual courage to challenge their assumptions and their accepted truths.

Thing 17

I subscribed to Remember the Milk two weeks ago and downloaded the free app to my smartphone. It refused to sync and I supect that this feature only works with the premium/paid version of the program. The failure to sync prompted me to make use of my Calendar entry feature on the home screen of my phone. This application functions much like Remember the Milk in that I can can create a to do list and check off my progress as I complete my tasks. RTM probably filled a niche that smartphones have usurped.

Sinced my RTM experiment proved less than ideal, I thought I would write a review of librarything which our library has used for over two years. When I started at DCHS, I uploaded all our print holdings to librarything and decided to use it as our primary online interface for students. Adding books to a collection is very simple and copy catalogiing is a one touch operation. Once you have selected a catalog record source ( we use the University of Michigan Collection and Amazon), you can use the ISBN to find a record for a particular title. You can edit the record to your satisfaction (we have opted to leave the records unaltered). For students searching our collection,a keyword search sifts through all fields: so the term "mice" would be enough to retrieve the popular Steinbeck title. Students would immediately know whether we owned the title. I have added barcode as a tag for each title. Still the question that arises is how students are meant to find the physical book rather than the record that refers to it. Our library is currently arranged according to Dewey. My hope is to convert our collection to LC call numbers ( a very ambitious hope). At present, students find me once they know for sure that we own the title and I use a Google Doc to let them know if the item is available (or checked out). I am waiting for an ILS that wuill provide circulation and acquisition modules using librarything as a backbone and then we will be able to pursue Kroger-style self-checkout for our students. Librarything also offers review copies of books and we have added a half dozen titles to our collection this way (I'm still working on the reviews of these free titles to fulfill our end of the bargain).