During the first two weeks of the new year, I put over 1000 miles on my car, driving around my state to visit five different school divisions.  Three were smaller rural divisions; two were larger suburban divisions. But, they all had several things in common.  All were grappling with challenges related to funding and student achievement.  All were concerned about what the new year and new administration would mean for schools.  And, all were aware that they were doing an impossible job in impossible circumstances.

Yet, all seemed to have a sense of hope and a level of optimism that I certainly didn’t feel as I thought about the impossibilities…if we just work a little harder, find some more resources, increase our own enthusiasm, we can engage the kids in the content and help them learn the state mandated content by the looming deadline.  But, while the test was certainly a driving force in their lives and the lives of their children, they also had personal goals for helping the kids learn to live, work and play successfully in the contemporary world.

They were trying to figure out how to balance all the demands they were juggling, always keeping the students’ needs firmly in mind. And, they were trying to figure out how to balance their own lives and work even while they are sponsoring clubs and staying late to tutor and sitting in the bleachers for the basketball game.  Mostly, they were working very hard.

I was reminded of a post by Chris Lehmann in which he mused about a system that requires martyrdom to function. Chris wrote,

I want to celebrate every teacher who has made this job a calling. Thank you. But my concern is that this nation thinks that building an entire system around martyrdom is the way to go — that if you aren’t spending 80 hours a week and thousands of your own dollars, you can’t be an effective Title I school teacher. (And yes, I know that it’s not THAT much better in the wealthier districts.) We cannot build a national system on the idea that KIPP and TFA and the 60-70 hour work week is acceptable. It’s not.

So as I watch Jakob and Theo play, stealing a moment where I can both be a dad (you have NO idea how many breaks I’ve taken in writing this entry) and a principal (I’ve answered about ten emails during the writing too,) I have a call to arms for us all.

Every time we see a teacher celebrated for their Herculean efforts, let’s all be sure to ask the following questions:

• What can be done to support and sustain you?
• How can we change the system that more people can be as successful as you?
• How can we create schools where it does not require Herculean efforts to be a successful teacher?

These and other questions were part of my own thoughts as I drove all those miles.  I’m going to throw out one possible solution for supporting and sustaining.  It’s off the cuff and a band-aid at that, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Why doesn’t planning time count towards professional development?  Every teacher does it, every day.  That means that every day they spend a bit of time in reflection on what they did and what they are going to do.  For most of them, they are alone when they do this reflection, sitting at their desks, jogging around the block or driving to the grocery store.

Most of the teachers I talked to have to turn in some kind of written plan to the office but they do not receive any feedback on it.  No conversation at all, in fact, for something they do every day of the year.  Maybe instead of having them sit through more drive by training, we could have them work together to reflect on their plans, to link their professional learning and growth to their professional practice.  Because they ARE reflecting, thinking all the time about their plans, but they are doing it all on their own time and alone.  Put them together, give them a chance to share, and suddenly all the individual energy comes together.  Rather than having a faculty meeting to tell people things that could be shared via email, have a faculty meeting that starts with the question, “What worked in your classroom today?  What didn’t work?”  Simple questions with complex answers.

You don’t need a consultant or even a model; you just need time for talking.  Time for exploring. Time for learning.  Is that so much to ask?

I enjoyed reading Scott McLeod’s series on issues related to outside consultants.  Scott does a great job pulling together lots of good ideas related to providing quality professional development.  He references both the National Speakers Association’s Code of Professional Ethics and the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) Code of Ethics as two excellent resources for guiding professional development planning.  (My colleague Chris O’Neal and I designed our presentation about professional development around the NSDC standards.) Scott also provides detailed tips for what organizers should look for in an outside consultant.   His post is a good start in terms of thinking about how we can be most useful to the people with whom we are working.  I would highly recommend all four posts.

Scott asked what we would add to his ideas.  As someone who does a variety of consulting from public speaking to developing courses to facilitating planning, here’s my bottom line: The key to being or hiring a successful consultant is to have the utmost respect for those with whom you are working.   That means respect for their time, certainly, but, more importantly, for their ideas and experiences.

I think Scott hinted at this in all four posts, but I want to mention it explicitly because I believe it needs to the starting point for any kind of professional development.  All those standards and suggestions seem obvious if you begin from a posture of respect.  You’re a learner along with the group. You’re there to address their needs and concerns. Certainly, you have knowledge and ideas to share but you couple that with a strong contextual understanding.

For me, the greatest indicator of respect relates to what Scott calls service:

We can charge whatever we think our time and expertise are worth (and the market will bear), but we should be providing something of value. Usually that means something practical that members of the organization can start using and acting upon tomorrow.

Offering something practical means that you have to take the time to learn about your participants because it is only by knowing about them that you can really make your work relevant to their lives and work.

As I read Will Richardson’s response to Jay Mathews’ Washington Post articles related to 21st century skills, I had a lightbulb moment (compact flourescent, of course).  Here’s the quote that flipped the switch for me in terms of some of the cognitive dissonance I’ve been experiencing lately:

But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

Will isn’t talking about student skills or literacy; he is talking about school infrastructure, both the bricks and mortar and clocks infrastructure and the curricular infrastructure.  It’s not as sexy as thinking about kids, but it is becoming the 800-pound gorilla in the room.  We just can’t take advantage of the kind of social networking possibilities that Will envisions within the current environment.   It’s something that Tim Stahmer writes about a lot, how silly it is that for all our connectedness and new understandings about learning, we continue to believe that kids only learn from 8 to 3 in the fall, winter and spring months, they all learn at the same pace and generally in the same way, and everything that’s important to learn can be tested through a multiple-choice test.  It’s also something that Tim suggested recently is nigh upon impossible to change.

If there is a more challenging educational paradigm than the organization of school, I don’t know what it is.  The physical/temporal structure seems to be part of the fabric of America and thus restructuring the school schedule seems to be the most resistant of reforms. There are glimmers of changes on the horizon, mostly wrapped around distance learning which, not surprising to this sometimes cynic, are being implemented to save money rather than in the much loftier interest of helping students engage with the community through social media tools.  They seem to tend to be online versions of face-to-face classrooms, primarily interested in delivering content related to the state standards. So while the format makes it easier to access education, it does not allow for the kind of passion-based, networked learning that Will is really envisioning.

For that to occur, there is a more pressing issue to deal with. High stakes, standardized testing is fast becoming as entrenched as the school schedule in the infrastructure of our national educational system, and I’m convinced it is the biggest problem we face in making any significant changes to curriculum and pedagogy in the schools.  In my state, teaching is all about clearly defined state-provided content.  Certainly there are some process standards but there is defined “essential knowledge,” mostly factual that will form the core of the test so teachers feel responsible for making sure students see all of it before the test in May.  Everyone single teacher I’ve talked to recently has said something to the effect that they know they aren’t supposed to teach to the test, but they also know that someone is going to talk with them if their scores go down to any significant degree and they certainly have to clearly identify which standard they are addressing every single day.  They get very little personal learning time, and they definitely don’t get an experimental year to try out new things.

I can’t help wondering what would happen if we just took a hiatus from the tests.  One year in the life of a classroom teacher and her students without the bubble sheet looming on the horizon.  Teachers would still teach the same subject (we won’t get too radical here), but they wouldn’t have to worry about covering every detail and could allow individual student interest to drive the learning.  So, without that accountability, would teachers everywhere just kick off their shoes and show movies the whole year?  I really don’t think so.  Instead, I think that given the opportunity, they would rediscover their own passion for the content that would lead them to an openness to new technologies and pedagogies that would support student engagement.

Since this is an imaginary scenario, I’ll also add that all teachers would have ongoing  job embedded professional development, technical and pedagogical support and adequate access to technological resources including the web, in short, if we  treated them like professionals.  Will got it right when he described teachers as “suffocating in paper, policies and processes that prevent them from exploring the potential of online networked learning spaces.”

To conclude, here’s the original quote from Will:

But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

He doesn’t define educators, but I immediately thought of a subset of the citizenry engaged in educational pursuits.  I would suggest this call needs to be extended to the community as a whole.  Infrastructure issues, whether physical, temporal, or curricular, are often not controlled by educators.  Instead, they originated with policymakers and legislators who are influenced by the opinions of many people, not just educators, and often make decisions for budgetary or political, rather than instructional, reasons.

It may be that we are living in an age of incommensurate paradigms. You simply can’t implement the kind of education Will describes within the confines of the prevailing paradigm.  Tinkering won’t do it this time.  Blaming teachers won’t do it either.  This is more than just adding some stuff to the curriculum called 21st century skills but a chance to really think about what Neil Postman called the “end” of education.  Everybody seems to want to have a national dialog: here’s a good starting point for the one about education.

There’s been an interesting back and forth in Twitter about 21st century literacy.  Tomorrow, it will spill over into an Elluminate session that I am sorry I will have to miss.  I’ve written about 21st century skills in the past, equating them with leadership skills and suggesting that Ben Franklin possessed most of the skills that we now label “21st century.” So, Ben Grey’s eloquent post about 21st century literacies resonated with me:

I believe this is where the whole notion is lost on me.  If we’re talking about literacy, let’s talk about literacy, as in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  If we’re talking about other skills that people need to be successful in the modern era, then we’re probably talking about skills rather than literacies.  If we’re being specific about these skills applying uniquely to the 21st century, we should probably call them such.  Although, are there really any skills that are being called 21st Century Skills that are new in the 21st century?  Think about it.  The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

In another post, he describes how his ideas about literacy relate to a tool like Voice Thread:

The real essence of using VoiceThread, however, is in engaging the true process of literacy.  First, I must either read or listen to the original idea being posted.  Once I’ve gathered meaning by doing so, I can formulate a response.  To respond, I will either speak or write my thoughts.  If I can’t do these core tenets of literacy effectively, VoiceThread will be useless to me.  It is the very act of engaging literacy that makes this process meaningful.

Certainly, Voice Thread relies on what some might consider “traditional” literacy skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening.  But there is another component that puts pressure on that definition: the use of images.  These might be the static images we choose to illustrate blog entries or they might be compiled into slide shows and videos, integrated with audio and text. Both choosing the images and then being able to read them seems to demand adding “viewing” to the definition.  I didn’t really understand visual literacy until I began making movies.  Learning how to let images help carry some of the story was an important lesson for me.

Literacy also has to do with knowing how to use available tools effectively and efficiently.  Learning to write across technologies is something I’ve considered before. Dean Shareski provides a perfect example when he writes about his frustrations with trying to use Twitter for deep conversations:

Certainly a great link can be posted but the minute a tweet engages people in a meaningful way that requires any degree of unwrapping, my immediate thought is “get a room”.  Frustrations mount as complex ideas are squeezed into a simple text messaging tool.

He recommends that people move into new spaces that allow more in-depth reflection:

Many newcomers to social media are trying to cram all forms of thinking and sharing into a single space such as Facebook or Twitter. I don’t think that’s a good idea.  While I always encourage people to start somewhere, I don’t mean for them to stay in one space.  So if you’re new to social media you might want to think about adding another space to your identity.  Take the idea tossed around in twitter and take it deep in your own space. Even if you only decontruct it yourself or have a couple of comments I think you’ll find that a more satisfying experience that trying to follow short snippets of insight. Twitter is great but a steady diet of twitter is like only ordering appetizers. At some point, you’ll want a main course.

His metaphor prompted me to think of one of my own: for me, Twitter is like a cocktail party.  We’re all sort of generally chatting and then a serious conversation takes off in the corner and we can eavesdrop and even got involved.  It dies down and may or may not be preserved but each person can take their bits and pieces and do something with them.  For bloggers like Dean, it might be a blog post.  For someone else, it might be a conversation in the teachers’ lounge. But the point is that different communication media have different languages and purposes and being able to navigate them effectively should be part of the definition of literacy.

And, once again, I reach into history to think about two people who were quite literate: Abigail and John Adams.  Like Ben Franklin, they used the communication media of their time more effectively than most people and their letters are a pleasure to read.  (And thanks to the Massachusetts Historical Society, you can not only read them but also view the originals!)  They hashed over the most petty domestic problems in the midst of conversations about revolution.  Since they spent much time apart, those letters were an important place for them to build their relationship, with over 1100 letters exchanged.  The pace is glacial when compared to our instantaneous world.  Talk about slow blogging!

Adams thought about literacy in his own time.  In a letter written just days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reflected on how different types of writing require different styles of language:

It is worth the while of a Person, obliged to write as much as I do, to consider the Varieties of Style …. The Epistolary, is essentially different from the oratorical, and the Historical Style …. Oratory abounds with Figures. History is simple, but grave, majestic and formal. Letters, like Conversation, should be free, easy, and familiar.

Abigail seems to take him at his word and her reply shows the easy familiarity of a long-married couple as she chides him for not providing the personal details she longs to hear:

I received a Letter from you by wedensday Post 7 of July and tho I think it a choise one in the Litterary Way, containing many usefull hints and judicious observations which will greatly assist me in the future instruction of our Little ones, yet it Lacked some essential engrediants to make it compleat. Not one word respecting yourself, your Health or your present Situation. My anxiety for your welfare will never leave me but with my parting Breath, tis of more importance to me than all this World contains besides.

Amidst all the lofty thoughts and big ideas, there is the need for simple human connection. How are you doing, she asks?  Whether we’re writing 140 character haikus or multi-paragraph blog entries, we are connecting with others as we do so.  Literacy facilitates that connection and children must be given experiences with all the various communication media so they can make smart choices about how best to make connections.

But, as Ben suggests, there is a difference between being literate and having the skills to manipulate the media.  As part of his contribution to the conversation, Gary Stager provided a link to an article by Seymour Papert from 1993 in which Papert discusses the changes that will take place in the way we communicate.  Papert writes:

But looking forward, we can formulate new arguments beyond the imagination of 19th century thinkers, who could hardly have conjured images of media that would provide modes of accessing and manipulating knowledge radically different than those offered by the Rs. Nor could they have formulated what I see as the deep difference between education past and future: In the past, education adapted the mind to a very restricted set of available media; in the future, it will adapt media to serve the needs and tastes of each individual mind.

He’s right: Abigail and John wrote letters because that was very restricted available media to them.  We face a plethora of media available to us and yet, I’m always struck by the fact that even though I’m staring at a computer screen, I’m doing a lot of traditional reading and writing.  There is some listening and viewing but it’s mostly text-based communication.

So, reading and writing still form the foundation of what it means to be literate.  But technical skills seem to loom larger now since we have to put those basics to work in a complex media world.  We can’t forget that part of literacy is related to navigating that media.  If we too narrowly define literacy, it’s easier to justify the fact that some 50% of Americans don’t have sufficient broadband access to watch Barack Obama’s weekly addresses on YouTube.   As this article from Business Week reminds us, defining literacy is less important than ensuring that everyone has access to practice those literacy skills.   In order to ensure access, we need to make it clear that knowing how to read and write with contemporary communications media does rise to the level of a literacy.  You can apply whatever adjective you wish–media literacy, digital literacy, 21st century literacy–what matters is the understanding that such literacy is the right of every citizen.

I spent most of yesterday online with educators, exploring the meaning of community.  Several hours were spent in Elluminate as part of Powerful Learning Practice’s ongoing professional development program.  From there, I moved to Second Life for VSTE’s weekly meeting where we explored educational groups.  We ended the evening with a snowball fight and, as you can see from the picture below, I dressed for the occasion.  (Always wanted to have wings!)

I just felt energized the whole day, having access to all these fellow travelers without having to leave my house!  We shared both professional and personally; we learned; we had fun. It was the kind of experience I would wish for learners of all ages.

Besides being reminded of the power of online community, I learned some specific content.  I was introduced to Google notebook, a tool I had not explored before.  I installed it and was eager to try it out this morning.  So, I logged into Twitter, knowing that someone would have a link to a good article to read.  Twitter has increasingly become a big part of my virtual learning community in a way that I could not have imagined when I first joined.  I was not disappointed this morning as Will Richardson had posted a link to a New Yorker article on teacher quality from Malcolm Gladwell.   My primary job right now is working with pre-service teachers and identifying good teachers is always a concern.

I read the article and, as Will suggested, skimmed the football stuff.  When I got to the first paragraph that was really about education, I discovered that it had already been highlighted by someone else, using Diigo.  I moused over to read the comment and discovered it had been made by Michael Scott, who I had just seen last week in Roanoke and who is a member of the VSTE Ning.  I took a break from reading to add Michael as a friend in Diigo.  The next highlight and comment came from Clay Burrell, a fellow Twitterer whose blog, Beyond School, is always thought provoking.  All I could think of is what a small world it was since, according to the Internet World Stats, there are nearly 1.5 billion people online these days.

I think the lesson here is that online is a real community, as real as the face to face community I enjoyed at last week’s conference in Roanoke.  It’s something my non-networked friends just don’t understand.  And it isn’t something that happened overnight either.  But it is part of my life now, and as I sit at my desk working alone from home on a rainy day, I feel the presence of that community.  Thanks to you all!

I finished Clay Christensen’s Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns a couple days ago and have been trying to put my reactions into some sort of order since.  I’m not sure I have done that yet, but comments from a few folks in my aggregator have helped a bit.  Will Richardson reports a conversation with Andy Ross, VP of the Florida Virtual High School:  “Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery.”

I couldn’t help but think of Christensen who argues pretty persuasively for online learning as a disruptive technology and uses the virtual high school as an example.  But it’s still school, isn’t it?  Sure, the students don’t meet face to face with a teacher but is meeting with that teacher online to learn content in order to pass a test really that much of an innovation?  In particular, I think it’s the phrase “programmed delivery” that makes me a little queasy here.  In the comments to Will’s post, Sylvia Martinez makes the point that drove it home for me: “This future of school sounds a lot like what we do now, just delivered in different ways.”

Christensen’s vision is a bit different as he imagines technology being used to customize the delivery in a way that makes sense to individual students.  But his vision of school in 2033 doesn’t seem all that different to me.  The bell still rings, students still assemble in classes, and there are lots of unanswered questions:  Are the kids still taking high-stakes assessments that drive the curriculum?  Are they still earning Carnegie units?  Are schools still funded by seat time? In other words, is it still about content rather than pedagogy or collaboration?

Tim Stahmer also drives the point home when he suggests that what passes for disruption still operates within an organizational paradigm that puts really limits on learning as he thinks about the candidates for education secretary:

Most are still committed to the traditional concept of “school”, one in which the teacher dispenses information to students assembled in groups for a fixed period of time each day for a fixed number of days each year and all of whom have a goal of moving on to a traditional college.

And, then there’s Dean Shareski who offers his own take on Will’s post by discussing the importance that face-to-face learning plays in his class: “While I can’t say to any more certainty what the future of school will completely look like, I do believe that the opportunity for students to learn from each and others will be more than just rhetoric which it pretty much is now.”  That was the one piece of Christensen’s vision that I appreciated without reservation: students helping each other learn. And while technology can support that interaction, it won’t be really useful until we develop a culture of collaboration.

Right now, the following items are open in side by side tabs in my browser:

The webpage for educon21, described as more of a conversation than a conference, committed to discussing the future of schools.   According to the page, there are five axioms underlying the conference that are guiding principals:

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5. Learning can — and must — be networked.

It will be held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia from January 23 to 25.  The conversations very much meet these axioms, concerned with reforming schools in ways that focus on creating networked, collaborative learning spaces.  The conference itself focuses on facilitating discussions rather than providing presentations.  It sounds like a wonderful place to do some visioning with like-minded people, many of whom are at least in my extended professional learning network.

In the next two tabs are two stories related to using technology to teach math.  eSchool News describes how colleges are meeting the challenge of math remediation by providing access to self-paced online math instruction.  Basically, schools subscribe to an online tutoring program that takes students through learning module and saves lots of money by not having to provide access to full-time faculty.  (An interesting aside about this article.  The data related to the cost of remediation comes from a study by Pearson.  And, guess what, Pearson has an online math tutorial subscription site!)

In an article from Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey speculates about why it is that, despite saving lots of money using technology, college tuition is going up.  He features Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium, a 700-computer-lab that run math tutorial modules complete with quizzes and tests.  Students progress at their own pace: “Instead of marking progress by time—the number of hours spent in proximity to a lecturer—Emporium courses measure advancement by evidence of learning.”  And while that seems like a worthwhile reform, it was implemented mostly due to budget and space problems rather than a concern for the learner.  Tech is an engineering bastion and all those engineers have to take linear algebra.  There just wasn’t enough class space or money for full-time professors so setting up 700 computers in a local mall and hiring grad students was the cheapest alternative.

I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance.  It’s like there are two parallel conversations about education and technology going on right now, and I’m involved in both of them.  One is about how technology can support changing the way we do education and the other is about how technology can offer solutions to current problems without making any real change in education.  The latter conversation offers efficiency as its goal and does put the student at the center of learning but not quite in the way that the educon21 folks have in mind.  It’s more about delivering content than it is about student learning.  And, in a world of high-stakes tests, content and product seem to trump pedagogy and process every time.

Both conversations can and will continue to go on at the same time for at least the foreseeable future.  I worry that if we spend too much time figuring out how to use technology to solve budget and space problems and deliver content efficiently then we’re distracted from considering how technology can be part of the transformation.  But then I interview teachers faced with mile-wide, inch-deep standardized curriculum that has to be covered before the test, and I’m not sure if the system is ready for the kind of transformation that is being discussed at educon21.

And, I find myself struggling to identify what my responsibility is to my pre-service teachers.  I’m trying to model a more student-centered collaborative learning experience that includes an emphasis on tapping into the network.  But I’m preparing them for a very different kind of classroom where they will face often overwhelming demands on their time, energy and passion.  How do I lessen the cognitive dissonance for them and help them find some middle ground?  Or is is that there isn’t middle ground?  Is it time to break the cycle of tinkering toward utopia as Tyack and Cuban suggest has happened throughout the long history of education by making a clean break and giving up everything the way Mike Bogle suggests we should do in his eloquent rant against the establishment:

We must forget everything we think we know; and approach learning as though we’ve never done it before; never been taught, and never taught others.

Certainly in an environment where “the test” is overshadowing everything else, such a break would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?

Thanks to John and Tom for pointing me to the new collection of Life photos available through Google Image search.  Both of them ask the same question: what about the copyright? And rightly so since there is nothing on the page itself to help a general user figure it out. The Google blog is excited about the images but doesn’t seem to think copyright is an important enough issue to mention.

My gut reaction as someone who talks to educators about copyright* is that the pre-1920 photographs are in the public domain since their copyright has expired.  Of course, I suppose that Life would claim they own the digital files,  but since they are simply recreations of the original file rather than significant transformations, I’m not sure that argument would hold out.  The newer photos would be covered by traditional copyright so if teachers and students wished to use them for purposes not covered by fair use, they would have to ask for permission.

I decided to test out my gut reaction by seeing what others were saying.  Search Engine Land quotes the press release:

LIFE’s Photo Archive will be scanned and available on Google Image Search free for personal and research purposes. Copyright and ownership of all images will remain with Time Inc.

But, they also point out that the FAQ page offers a different take on possible uses:

What can I do with the images I find from the LIFE photo archive?
You can browse and view the images you find, rate them, and see detailed information about the photographs. There is also a link to buy image merchandise provided by LIFE.

Poking a bit more, I found Slashdot’s report of the images.  It doesn’t talk about copyright, but copyright is discussed in the comments.  At least one commenter agrees with me about the public domain status of the older photos.   But he also points out that proving public domain for the digital images would involve a costly legal battle.

This gets to the heart of the problem with copyright: it’s all grey area.  The US Copyright Office makes it clear: “The distinction between “fair use” and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined.” I generally tell people that their fair use rights end when they post a project to the web.  And the distinction between the photo and its digital image seems a pretty grey area as well.

John recommends that, in order to stay safe and legal, it would be best to use them only for personal use.  And the rational part of me agrees.  But the irrational part is a little annoyed.  Shame on Google and Life for not being more clear about the copyright! These are iconic images and for students and teachers learning about history, being able to use these photos in multimedia projects would be wonderful.   As John also wisely suggested, a Creative Commons license would make this so much easier. Non-commercial uses could be permitted while commercial uses, which is clearly what Life is going for here, could be controlled.  What’s to lose?

*I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my audiences: I’m really liberal and I’m not a lawyer.  I think teachers and students should be able to do whatever they want with materials they find as long as they are using them for educational purposes.

A gloomy day here.  The rain brought down the leaves and it is starting to look like winter.  The dogs are sprawled around me, snoozing, and I can’t muster the energy for a thoughtful blog post.  But, I do have a few sites to share on several different topics so here’s the random Friday round up:

Miami Book Fair Celebrates 25 Years:  I heard this story on NPR yesterday as I drove back and forth across the state.  The founder of the fair is an independent book store owner in Miami and he reflects on how things have changed since 1983.  When asked about the challenge of selling analog books in an increasingly digital age, he comments that he is “selling the past.”

Guest Blogger on Eduwonk:  I credit Andrew Rotherman (aka Eduwonk) with helping me pass my comprehensive exams at William and Mary.  Today, his guest blogger is none other than Margaret Spellings, soon-to-be former Secretary of Education.  She writes about a new report from the Department of Education that details five areas in which federal, state and local goverments can collaborate to support the use of technology in education.

I Think I’m Musing My Mind:  I’m sorry that I can’t remember who steered me to this piece by Roger Ebert but I’ve read and re-read it several times since.  I found myself highlighting several of his key ideas that resonated with me in this thoughtful reflection on his writing:

The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.

Of course I don’t think only about writing. I spend time with my wife, family and friends. I read a lot, watch a lot of politics on TV. But prose is beavering along beneath, writing itself. When it comes time to type it is an expression, not a process. My mind has improved so much at this that it’s become clearly apparent to me. The words, as e. e. cummings wrote, come out like a ribbon and lie flat on the brush. He wasn’t writing about toothpaste. In my fancy, I like to think he could have been writing about prose.

Collaborating with Diigo:  From jdtravers, an excellent video with practical tips for using Diigo to comment on student work.  My own experience with Diigo expanded this week.  I blogged about the Bauerlein article and then used the highlights from Ruben Van Havermaet to explore more about new media, including spending a few hours reading Andrew Plotkin’s interactive fiction game Shade.   And, Jeremy Douglass’s website made me think about what it means to be an English major in the 21st century as I approach the 25th anniversary of my own graduation.

This article from The Miami Herald was featured in today’s ASCD Smart Brief.   Richard Sterling, former director of the National Writing Project discusses the potential for online tools for teaching writing:

Sterling believes blogs, MySpace, Facebook, e-mail, IM and texting all have potential for improving a student’s ability to write. While some critics worry about how the abbreviated nature of online and text communication ignores basic grammar and spelling rules, Sterling isn’t concerned.

”Creatively abbreviated words like GR8 and issues like not capitalizing after punctuation don’t worry me — and some changes may eventually become standard,” Sterling says. “Students are savvy, and they will learn to adjust the way they write to fit the audience.”

That last bit–writing to fit the audience and, increasingly, the format–is one of the most important ideas for me as I always found it a difficult topic to deal with in the traditional classroom where it seemed as though I was often the only audience.   The article goes on to quote KC Culver, assistant director of the University of Miami Writing Center:

‘Discussion boards, blogs and wikis present a huge benefit: They give students a real audience, rather than the outdated `student-to-teacher’ writing,” Culver says. “Students put more effort into their critical thinking and writing because they want to be the post that gets commented on. In composition, we like to talk about reading and writing as an ongoing dialogue. With the Internet, this becomes a reality.”

The ideas about audience really hit home with me.  I recently submitted an article to a practitioner journal.  When the editor returned it to me for revisions, one thing she mentioned was that it sounded too academic for her audience.  And she was right.  I’ve been doing so much writing for my graduate courses that it was tough to change gears for a different type of publication. I do know that my writing style changes as I move from academic writing to this blog to a discussion forum to an email.  Lately, I’ve also been playing a bit with Twitter…just what can you achieve in 140 characters?

Finally, the article goes on to talk about “new” types of writing, specifically those incorporating multimedia, which I see as an essential skill in the digital age.   By learning to create multimedia, we are better able to read and understand it ourselves.  Again, it was a lesson I had to learn.  When I set about to make my first long (12 minutes!) video, I started with words and wrote a multi-page, single spaced script.  But, as I sat down to do the creating and editing, I realized I simply couldn’t get all those words into the movie.  Instead, I had to trim the script to just one page and let the images and video clips I used do the heavy lifting for me.  It was a new way of thinking about writing for this old-school English major.

Through all of this, I worry that the standardized tests are limiting the way teachers approach writing instruction with all the focus on writing the five-paragraph essay.   It’s not a terrible form to master in terms of the concept of building an argument but it is pretty artificial when we consider all the formats available for students.  In addition, the writing process is turned into a simple formula (brainstorm, draft, revise, publish) that does not help students understand its recursive nature and skips over the whole idea of reading and writing as a dialog.  Wouldn’t it be fun to have a writing prompt like the one Hall Davidson gave us at the VSTE conference last year: tell a story in six words.  Now there’s a challenge to your writing skills!