I've recently joined (and created) a few ning social networks; mostly as a result of different projects I'm involved in. The networks are typically small; made up of people I know or people whose work I'm familiar with. In most cases we've been invited by a third party to collaborate.

Anyway, shortly after becoming part of these networks I started getting "friend requests" from different people on the network. Now in these small groups that we're working in, where some of us are meeting for the first time, working together on a larger project, it sort of makes sense to me that everyone is just being friendly and wants to be friends with everyone else. I like that. I like working in collegial environments.

Some of these invitations to friendship are from people I've never come across which is kind of flattering. The thing is, one of the invitations came from a person who, in their profile, said that they know nothing about the network they had joined. They just wanted to see what develops in the space. When I look at the profiles of some of the folks inviting me to friendship I see 500, 600+ friends in their personal network. 500 friends? Who has 500 friends? Maybe my definition of "friend" is too restrictive but, as a friend of mine pointed out the other day, these folks may just be building mailing lists. (Smells like spam.)

I suspect this is the sort of group Graham was talking about a while back. There's also a distant echo here from Bud's recent post.

... are these meaningful, two-way partnerships, or are we lowly teachers being taken advantage of a little bit?

I haven't read much from my Bloglines account in months. The accumulation was overwhelming. I've just downsized from 181 feeds to 20. It wasn't easy ... until I changed my attitude. I asked myself what sources educate me the most? Not "What am I interested in?" My interests are diverse and I tend to immerse myself in them. When I shifted focus to those sources that push my thinking and teach me new things it became easier.

Doing this has inspired me to read my feeds again. I'm eager. It's been a long time since I felt that way ... reading had become a chore. I've also switched from Bloglines (although I'm hanging on to the account ... I'm thinking I'm going to use it to store feeds as references or examples to cite when talking to other teachers about the read/write web) to Google Reader. The tipping point was Alan's latest post about all it's ajax gooodness.

Interesting riff off of Karl's presentation from back in August. This one is by Darren Draper from the Jordan School District in Utah.

It's called Pay Attention.

I've been slow to blog for lots of reasons. One of them is a feeling (self imposed and, as a result, particularly paralyzing -- does anyone else ever feel this way?) that there are things that I have to write about; but I just read something that I really want to share.

On Monday the first two Developing Expert Voices projects were published to the project blog. Two more will be published next week and the week following will see a steady stream of projects published until June 4.

Ivy was the second student to publish her project. If you look at it you'll see she worked hard on her presentation but struggled with the content. This led to her talking with me about ways she could go back and review the content she had difficulty with. Many students who struggle in math are happy to wait for a difficult unit to pass, put it behind them and forget about it. I think Ivy's renewed interest in relearning the content she had trouble with is a direct result of this project. The idea is to "teach other people and learn at the same time." They do this by creating their own problems and explaining the solutions as clearly as possible. The students are learning that making up good problems is no easy task. Writing well written solutions is also hard work.

One student, Graeme, told me he learned more doing this project than anything he's ever done before. Graeme published his project first. It uses text, graphics, a SlideShare slideshow, and several explanatory podcasts. Lani was struck by what he wrote in the Reflection section of his project and asked him about it:

Hi Grey-M,

The podcasts really help to contribute to understanding the content. Your voice, tone, and easy speak were a very good listen!

I am very interested in your reflection especially when you say:
"When I did the problems I knew exactly what I was doing but when explaining them the words escaped me. I almost think that it would have been worth doing journeyman level questions for the boost in the mark of annotation because I don't know if my answers are going to get through to everyone. I know what I mean but others may not. With an easier question that you have a stronger foundation in you'll be able to explain it much better."

This first question may be unfair-- Do you think you would have learned as much had you chosen journeyman level questions? Is this really all about the marks?

Do you think, now that you have experienced difficulty in explaining what you feel you really know (that has happened to me alot!) that perhaps you didn't know it as well as you thought? And that in composing an explanation you've really extended your understanding?

Best,

Lani

We're so fortunate to have Lani "in" our class. Not being a math specialist she focuses on helping the students stay focused on their learning. And she asks just the right questions in just the right way. ;-) (Emina, a professor of mathematics, has also been doing some great mentoring. In Vincent's scribe post the comments hold a great discussion pushing Vince to clarify his thinking again and again and again.) I was particularly struck by Graeme's reply to Lani, for several reasons ...

Hi Lani,

I must say that doing the harder level questions did by far extend my understanding but as the project description says it is not just our understanding, it is everyone who wants to learn the materials understanding that counts as the point of this is to assume the role of the teacher while teaching ourselves. Doing the expert questions taught me more but in doing so may have given the other people less in comparison to a journeyman question that would have given me less but with their explanations given others more. Then again if people get my explanations completely then the expert questions are the way to go because they'd be teaching yourself as much as the other person.

Graeme really groks the purpose and intent of the assignment. He goes on to contrast the value of learning with the value, validity and fairness associated with grading student work ... (my emphasis added)

As for your other question the marks are important to me but it is merely a byproduct of the hard work invested into the teaching of ourselves and others in this case as that is the main goal. If you don't achieve that goal you won't get the marks as it is based on how well you teach and apply concepts. (and a high mark in Mr.K's class is a badge of honor as he has the most wicked hard tests you can imagine as most questions aren't routine and truly test your understanding. A mark of say 70 in Mr.K's class is probably and 80 or 85 in other math teachers classes.). But I must say that marks do unfortunately matter. A University is going to choose the person with the higher marks if all the rest is equal (even though certain teachers are easier to pass then others so I don't see it as a fair process). In the end though I think that understanding trumps marks. I failed an identities test but I understand that concept completely, foolish errors caused by going to fast and the stress of the test. In the end that will get me farther than if I had fluked the questions and got a high mark without understanding what I did completely.

[I really didn't know I was considered such a "tough" teacher. ;-)] Here's a student who has gotten everything out of this assignment that I could have hoped and dreamed for all my students. He articulates the tension between learning and grading so well and concludes "that understanding trumps marks." He finishes by talking about a particular moment of clarity he had that came about not from creating a problem but from the act of explaining (teaching) the solution ...

Explaining the work in words and diagrams so that others can understand it made my understanding of it become rock solid. I may have known methods to merely complete them before but to be able to explain them is to be able to fully grasp problem and see the nuances and intricacies that you may not have seen before leading to a better way. Like the last slide on the velodrome question. I never saw that until I had explained everything.

As Mr.K would say... cheers!

Grey-M

I think we're going to do this sort of work again in my class. ;-)

Some friends of ours send their kids to a local Jewish parochial school. Over the spring break I was invited to speak to the staff at the school about web 2.0 in education. There are about 10 teachers in the school, including the principal, and none of them had ever heard of web 2.0, blogs, wikis or podcasts before except as buzzwords in the mainstream media.

By far the highlight of the morning was Kathy Cassidy. Kathy graciously made herself available to skype in to our workshop and chat live with the teachers. Many of them had never seen or heard of skype before. It was a powerful experience for them. They had seen Kathy's presentation from K12 Online and after hearing how a self described "non-techie" teacher leverages the power of web 2.0 tools to foster enthusiasm and excitement for learning in her students, they were juiced.

By the end of the day we had six new blogs started. The principal really "gets" the possibilities inherent in blogs, wikis and podcasting for his school, teachers and students. One family is leaving the school for a year to live in Israel, the teachers are planning to keep in touch and maintain connections between the students and their school via a blog.

After we had chatted with Kathy, he announced that when they get back from their break next week each teacher will be required to maintain a blog. They will publish a minimum of one post per week about anything they like as long as it relates to what is going on in their classrooms. He's also made a commitment to find 15-20 minutes in their instructional week to free them up to do this. We're going to collect the feeds from all the blogs and create a Protopage (linked to the school's website) so that parents can see what's going on throughout the school at a glance.

Here are the slides from the presentation on SlideShare and here's the link to the video of the first half of the workshop. We used the second half of our morning together to build new blogs for each of the teachers in the workshop.

Full screen version here.

The links embedded in the slideshow aren't working on the web hosted versions so I've added the list of links, organized by slide, below:

Slide 1: George Siemens, link, Alan Levine, http://adifference.blogspot.com.

Slide 2: photo source.

Slide 3: video source.

Slide 4: Go2Web2.0.

Slide 5: The Weblog Project.

Slide 6: Nancy White, video source.

Slide 7: A Difference, Applied Math 40S (Winter '07).

Slide 8: Wikipedia, 1000 Names wiki.

Slide 9: The Important Thing About a Wiki.

Slide 10: What is a Wiki?, Heavy Metal Umlaut: the movie, John Udell.

Slide 11: Ask A Ninja, video source.

Slide 12: What is a Podcast?, How to Podcast.

Slide 15: video source, Visit K12 Online.

Slide 16: Class Blogmeister, Flickr, Audacity, video tutorial, BubbleShare, Wikispaces.

Slide 17: The Story of Eddie.

Slide 18: The Language of Math.

Slide 19: Eddie and Intro to Trig Modeling and Flickr.

Slide 20: A Good Day.

Slide 21: There's Something Happening Here.

Slide 22: Tell The Stories.

Slide 23: Great Day in Georgia.

Slide 24: One Drop of Water.

Slide 25: photo source.

Slide 26: small voices, Kathy Shields.

Slide 27: EduBlogs Star Award, Duck Diaries.

Slide 28: Trout Blog.

Slide 29: Mark Ahlness, The Mighty Writers Blog.

Slide 30: Al Upton and the miniLegends.

Slide 31: EduBlog Award Winners 2006, Have Fun With English 2.

Slide 32: Room 613 Student Blogs 06-07, Room 613 Student Blogs 05-06.

Slide 33: Clarence Fisher, Excellence and Imagination, International Teen Life Project.

Slide 34: video source.

Run, don't walk, over to Chris Harbeck's class blog to learn about his un-Project and see what his kids have done. Most of it is published on the Un-Project wiki but some un-projects have been published to the blog as well. My favourite so far is this one. ;-)

Look what's possible when we give kids an open ended (un)project and the tools to publish their work online for a wide audience.

Over the spring break I hacked (just a little bit) together a new blog where my students will be publishing their Developing Expert Voices projects. The blog is here and the first projects will be published on Monday. I know of at least two students that are planing to include podcasts as part of their presentations. Many of my students have started reading this blog and it turned out to be a good thing. Some of the content here includes podcasts and links to online presentations in a variety of formats which modeled for my students what can be done with a blog. I'm really looking forward to what they're going to publish.

For anyone who is interested in doing something similar with their students you can read all the posts I've written here on this project and how it has evolved.