On the Stager and Richardson UStream “Bootleg”

If you’ve got an hour to burn, you might enjoy watching Will Richardson and Gary Stager in this moderated keynote discussion at NYSCATE recently. (h/t to David Jakes for “bootlegging” it with his laptop for UStream.)

Stager’s skepticism about much of the edublogosphere discourse is a healthy corrective for the “cheerleader 2.0″ bandwagon we’re all riding to some degree.

Highlights for me included, at 16 minutes, one of the two mentioning that “there are no models of good student blogging” to set a standard (my frame, not theirs) for the use of blogs in literacy development. The launch, now one short week away (knock wood), of the new “Students 2.0” edublog featuring Kevin Walter (Chicago), Anthony Chivetta (St. Louis), “Arthus Erea” (Vermont), Sean “the Bassplayer” Law (UK), Nicole Kim (Korea), Stacy Zheng (New York), Lindsey (Hawaii), and Dillon Decicio (Washington State) will hopefully serve as one such model. And while the jury is still out on the “visionary classroom blogging” project with my own seniors, it’s only two months old – and any project worth its salt will always face obstacles, challenges, and bumps. Good connective bloggers aren’t built in a day.

At 28 minutes, Stager nails the pitfalls of most (American, as he points out, as opposed to more enlightened Australian) approaches to 1:1 staff development. Stager’s opinion that teachers should be trained to experience the tools and procedures – the types of learning – their students will be expected to practice in the classroom encouraged me to continue my own recent attempts in that direction, such as the so-far-underwhelming experiments I’ve done this week with digital storytelling. (I’m so glad I didn’t inflict this on my students. I would have, had I not tried it first.)

At 42 minutes (part of a topic concerning teaching computer programming as a basic, core subject), Stager wins the “quote of the day” award by saying (and I paraphrase),

It’s like somebody decided that all students would not be required to learn to program the machine that will dominate their futures, but would be required to learn to write a haiku. When was that meeting?

(Another Stager quotable: “Instead of the machine programming the students, why not the students programming the machine?” In that connection, I’ll note that the only students I’ve literally paid by the hour for their valuable knowledge were a couple of the Students 2.0 contributors, who gave me some lessons on SSH shell commands and other server administration points that no adults in my network could give. I’ve never offered students money to tell me the third longest river in the world, by comparison – or to write me a haiku.)

At 49 minutes, an interesting discussion begins on “hitting a wall as a blogger.” There’s a lot of that happening around the e’sphere these last few months. It points to the fact that we are all not only theorists or researchers, but are also part of the data itself. We seem to have reached a point of possible burn-out, over-heating, or bubble-bursting in our 2.0 evangelizing and experimenting. If it’s happening to us, what are the implications for our classrooms? (Any of you notice how frequently the top tier bloggers, for example, don’t respond to comments on their blogs, thus arguably violating the “blogging as conversation” pact implicit in the act of blogging?)

At 59.30, Stager expresses his frustration that few people seem to be “moving the ball further down the field.” I don’t know if that’s fair, but will say that I, for one, don’t feel much need for the raft of “a million tools” type catalogues that we’re seeing so much of. As Alan November pointed out in Shanghai back in October, this approach is mere “snapshots of an avalanche,” since 28,000 new applications are in development as I write. Here’s to subscribing to sites like Mashable and Kollabora for those bulletins, and reading more edublog posts about attempts to “move the ball forward” in our classrooms.

It was good, finally, to see Thomas Friedman taken down a notch. Again, Stager:

Friedman wrote the book. We bought it.

(And I’ve railed more than once about our catastrophically myopic framing of education and our students’ futures in Friedman’s economic terms – it’s all about more competition, bread-winning, and consumerism, and not a lick about citizenship and environmental stewardship. Karl Fisch et. al.‘s otherwise compelling “Did You Know” needs a re-mix to expand that frame accordingly.)

Anybody who could have such a pathetic grasp of foreign policy as Freidman – read his “Iraq: Suck. On. This.” of 2002 (and thanks for selling the American Left on the invasion of Iraq, Tommy-boy), or his latest bit of idiocy, the “Obama/Cheney” ticket idea – should have his edublogger idol status revoked. No, on second thought, invading Iran – as Friedman wants us to keep as a close-at-hand “solution” in case Iran chooses its own sovereignty over American demands – is just what the US educational system needs. It must be true, because Tom says so.

1. Unlocking Teacher Creativity: An Approach to Staff Development?
2. “That’s not Homework; That’s Writing”: Authentic Student Blogging (Presentation Snippet 2)
3. Tune in to Melbourne’s Project Global Cooling uStream Today
4. Visionary Student Blogging: or, The Ghost in the Machine

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