This is how personal learning networks work. When I first started using Second Life for education, I was helped by a teacher there, Kevin Jarrett, who I started following on the del.icio.us social bookmarking service. I use del.icio.us for social discovery -- that is, when I find someone knowledgeable about a topic that interests me, I add them to my social bookmarking network and I also look for the people whose bookmarks they often use -- their del.icio.us or diigo network, another great social bookmarking service. Through Kevin, I found Bud The Teacher. I follow both of them on Twitter. Last week, while scanning Twitter, I noted that Bud The Teacher was using a collaborative document creation application called EtherPad. I asked him via a publicly viewable tweet whether he had an example of students who used it, and within a minute, I heard from someone who I had not known previously, but who followed me on Twitter - a teacher who sent me a link to the Etherpad document edited collaboratively by her sixth grade class. So I contacted the 6th grade teacher, Meredith Stewart. As soon as I became aware of what she was doing, I was interested in hearing more from Stewart. She is willing to experiment with new tools, understands that facilitating student collaborative learning and fostering in each student a sense of individual agency as a learner, not technology for the sake of technology, are the important goals for technology-augmented classrooms.… more

The Social Media Classroom, a browser-based, free and open source environment for teaching and learning, grew directly out of the first minutes I stepped into a physical classroom and began to realize that I needed to readjust my assumptions about students, classrooms, and educational media. Five years ago, when I began to teach at Stanford and UC Berkeley, two places where I had expected web-based media to have permeated the classrooms, I was surprised to see blank looks on so many faces when I announced that students should start their personal blogging and wiki collaborations.… more

Historian Robert Darnton has argued that we are currently in the fourth great Information Age in all human history.  The first information revolution came with the development of writing in 4000 B.C. Mesopotamia.  The second was facilitated by the invention of movable type (in 10th Century China and 15th Century Europe).  The third was marked by the advent of mass printing (presses, cheap ink and paper, mass distribution systems, and mass literacy) in late 18th Century Europe and America. The current Information Age is the fourth such era, marked by the development of the Internet and, more importantly, the World Wide Web in 1991 with its open access structure that makes possible the interconnection of all the world’s knowledge to all the world’s people.  The point of this historical perspective is to remind us that the last decade has seen transformations of a kind notable even from the long perspective of the record of human history.  Our Information Age has been the most extensive and rapid in human history, structurally altering traditional economic and political arrangements on a global level and, at the same time, restructuring communication, interaction, publication, and authorship in all currently available media.  Is it any wonder that many of us are wondering what will happen next—or asking how best to prepare ourselves for what comes next?… more

Let’s try a thought experiment.   Let’s assume we live in a culture where all forms of educational achievement tests have been banned and no one is allowed to assign a letter or numerical grade for anything.   How would we evaluate what students are learning?  How would we decide which teachers were doing their job effectively or how they could be more effective?  Would there be objective (i.e. impartial, unbiased) ways of determining who was the smartest student and who needed help?   And why would we want or need to know that?  Without testing, would being the best be a useful question?   Or, as a mathematician would ask, would that question be an interesting one (one that could yield an answer that wasn’t simply a circular restating of the question)?  How would the content and methods of education change if assessment by means of testing and grading was banned?… more