Wow. Brain explosion. Just like I keep thinking about how fascinating it is that most sessions at ed tech shows are lecture-style, even when discussing collaborative technologies–and when I read the above I immediately thought of how we expect students to obediently do something we recognize teachers wouldn’t want to do.

Just as a point of interest, and for the sake of ed tech history, I started Classroom 2.0 after a series of discussions Will Richardson and I had about the need to have educators actually use the tools of Web 2.0 before they would understand their value or how to bring them into the classroom. When I saw Ning, I had a fleeting thought that it might be an easier way to do this than asking folks to blog to the empty room for 9 months… Classroom 2.0 was throwing spaghetti against the wall, and that it stuck was something of a delightful surprise.

I do think that social networks, and Ning in particular, really help to introduce and environment for engaged dialog. For many educators, that will be all they want to do, and in my mind, is a huge step forward. I’ve gotten so many comments from teachers and administrators who joined who started participating online for the first time there, and it was a real turning point for them. Some of them will move on to blogging and the “real” distributed web, and that will be good to.

I will say that I think the discussions are different in the social networks than on the blogs, and that we can recognize them as different and equally valuable. There is a collaboration in the social networks, and a sort of egalitarian (ego-less) achievement of thought that I personally feel is harder in blog comments–partly because of the ability to have threaded comments in Ning, and partly because blogs tend to be a little oriented toward the “wisdom” of the blogger. Am I alone in feeling that?

I’m really glad to have come across this and the other related posts, and appreciate the deep thinking. And, I’ll say, a little tongue in cheek, it’s been harder to follow this discussion over three blogs than it would have been in one forum post in Ning…

http://teachercommunal.wikispaces.com/Samples

It’s also good professional practice that can strengthen the educational practices of all those involved in the school. There have been many times in my career that I wish I could have had the chance to sit in on one of my colleagues classes so that I could see what they were doing and learn from them. I finally feel like I have now gained that ability because of blogging and, as a result, I believe I’ve grown more as an educator in the past 6 months than I had grown in the 10 years prior to this. A lot of it has to do with the wonderful ideas and practices that have been shared to me by people like yourself and the others who have commented to this post. I don’t see why this model wouldn’t want to be duplicated on a smaller scale within the immediate school building

As for my presentation, I’m taking a page out of Patrick’s post, “Some thoughts on Changing our Practices” and am working on setting up a structure, such as Kelly mentioned, and offering choices, such as Wes mentioned, for teachers to see what’s possible and think about how they can take those ideas and fit them within their current teaching practice and technology comfort level. It’s not done yet, but here’s the wiki I’ve made so far which includes samples from which other teachers could learn from. My main fear is teachers feeling overwhelmed by it all.

We’re going to start the morning by signing all staff up with a “baker’s dozen” of must-have 2.0 accounts and bookmarks - Google, Diigo/del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines (they can OPML to something more complex like Pageflakes or iGoogle later), and other things (all on this wiki).

Then we’re going into breakaway sessions led by the early adopters at our school - 11 separate workshops from which teachers choose three, and are required to take my “Digital Arts Menu for Multiple Intelligences,” in which the goal is to let them choose a mode of digital expression suited to their learning style and creative bent.

By the end of the week, they’ll be “encouraged” (okay, required) to reflect on their blog or Ning, in whatever medium they choose.

And I’m trying to figure out how to set up an auto tag-aggregator to suck all those posts onto one page. Never done that before! Tips?

Thanks, all - you’re making this exhausting process an exhilarating one at the same time

Your post - and Sue’s comment on both of our posts - extended my thinking and enlarged my network (I’ll be checking out your links to Darren and Keving shortly!). And it all happened through Technorati.

And that sort of underlines what I think we’re both trying to get at, without at all disagreeing with Sue’s point that Ning is clearly powerful. It underlines that the whole blogosphere produces pathways in a different way than Ning does. Again, both have their uses and relative strengths (Ning’s media players are incredible, for example, and I embed them in my blog posts on Blogger, though I wonder how easy that is on WordPress - have you tried?).

One distinction seems safe - Ning’s population seems comprised more of newcomers, and it would be interesting to track how often they peer over the walls, and how often and soon they establish their own blogs, their own connections through non-Ning RSS feeds, etc.

Again, I don’t think we’re disagreeing with Sue. I’d even hazard the guess that’s Sue’s ultimate goal is for her Ning members to go “open range” once they’re in deep enough.

Tribes v. Nomads comes to mind, I’m not sure how fairly or validly.

And your point about the pleasures of creating your own unique fingerprint in this world is the one that really seems possible only in the open range.

I’m glad we’ve connected, by the way. It’s been instructive and, as importantly, good for some chuckles

Last week I had to run an 1 hour online session on Video in Elearning for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. I had to target it at beginners but was asked to make it interactive. Tough requests considering it was all online using Elluminate.

So I decided to set up a Ning community so that participants could discuss the topics before and after the session plus use it for practicing embedding videos. You can check out more about the session and how it went here.

What I found was that participants are slowly starting to use Ning. I have a much greater understanding of who they are and what assistance I can provide them compared to what I and they would have gained from a 1 hour online presentation. If all this interaction was based only on my blog I would not have achieved the same outcome.

Most of these participants are not using Feed Readers and do not know what RSS is. So to see that several individuals are achieving what they see as first is for me the greatest reward and the Ning community gives me the ability to gradually increase their skills (those that want to) to get them to the point where they can be moved out into other parts of Web 2.0.

I suggest you check out my page at etools and tips for educators to see what the participants are saying.

Sue

I agree with Papert that “uniformity” really is a major evil in formalized education, so the degree to which we can provide differentiated pathways of learning and assessment for teachers in PD sessions as well as students in their classes, the better off we are in avoiding the dangers “uniformity” presents to authentic learning.

Good luck with your workshop! I’ll look forward to hearing what you all end up doing and how things go!

I love being called out like this! Kelly speaks of giving them something like iGoogle or Pageflakes to begin with, but it sounds like you have inroad already with Anthony and with another teacher whose name escapes me at the moment, which can be to your advantage when presenting a new idea to a staff that is slightly hesitant.

Base it may be, but envy has always been something that I have used to my advantage when presenting to staff. I make it a point to present the work of teachers that are leading the charge, creating digital content with their students. What I have found is that other teachers want to do what this teacher or that teacher did. Like I said, it may not reside on the ethical high-road, but when it comes to initiating change, I’ll take anything I can get.

Concerning the walled garden idea, my belief lies along the same lines as using emotion to trigger buy in; you need to assess the comfort level your staff has with these social applications. Asking someone who has not written for a non-student audience in 10 years to do so will paralyze them. As much as you may want to blow them away with what is possible, you run the risk of losing them if you go too far above where they are comfortable.

Just some thoughts…Will contribute to the wiki in a short while.