12 Changes

They're already here...
and every Teacher needs to know about them!

Technology has resulted in a number of significant changes in the ways people communicate, learn and create. This slideshow highlights a number of trends that should lead to significant changes in classrooms around the world.

12 Changes

View more presentations from Rodd Lucier. (tags: change classroom)

Just in case anyone would like an audio explanation of the slides, here is the companion podcast:



Do you see any other significant changes that should lead to changes in the ways we teach & learn?

Community Learning in a New Year

A fresh start is never more than a number of weeks away if you work in a teaching & learning environment. A new school year, a new term, a new teacher... or in the case of tomorrow morning, the first day of school in the global 'New Year'. Over the holiday break, I had the opportunity to experience both good fortune and tragedy, but is was the latter that helped me to see this 2008 new year through new eyes.

The Kids are Alright. They may experience community differently than you and I, but their passions run deep, and their purposes are largely positive. With the Christmas Eve passing of a 15 year old friend of the family, I saw first hand how young people are leveraging Web 2.0 tools to share their grief. In fact, it was through the my 16 year old daughter's Facebook account that we came to know of the tragic loss of Michael whose family has grown up a few hours away. Michael will never be able to read the posts of his peers, but the tragedy of his loss is likely to be archived in the passionate posts of friends, classmates and relatives for a very long time.

It affirms for me that the youth of today, are by and large, responsible, compassionate and loving citizens; and the writings of 'random teens' reminds me that from within our evolving technological world, it is the people that matter the most. In the lives of netizens, the technology or the read/write web is a useful tool, but it is at its most powerful when it is used in the context of creating community.

So, here is a challenge for Teacher 2.0: Use available tools to broaden your learning communities. Make overt plans to involve others in your own professional work and in the work of your students. Reach out to the people that are important in the 'real world' lives of members of your learning community. Regardless of the stresses of school life in 2008, our humanity ties each of us to a number of communities of real people, whose impact on our lives is more significant than we realize. When we are engaged in learning that harnesses the power of these relationships, memorable, meaningful experiences can be the result for teachers and students alike!

A Darker Shade of Grey: Cheating in Digital Times

Recent news articles lead me to the conclusion that cheating is the norm. My experience in the classroom tells me that educators can use these stories to generate discussion on 'Cheating in these times of Digital Media'.

Whether you consider the confessed drug use of Marion Jones, the denials of Floyd Landis, the reporting of Major League steroid users, or the 'spygate' controversy of the New England Patriots, the issue of cheating in high stakes athletics becomes less surprising by the day. Once out of the ordinary, cheating seems to be accepted (at least by co-conspirators) until someone gets caught. Then it's a few weeks of denials before tearful 'coming clean' press conferences.

This wave of reporting on cheaters in athletics, has prompted me to think about how 'normal' cheating seems to be in everyday life.

Consider the ways global citizens make use of technology in order to get 'something for nothing':

* bootlegged DVDs
* music downloading
* video game cheat codes
* iPhone hacks
* identity theft

While the consequences of getting caught doing these things varies greatly, the acceptability of digital theft has become common to many and disconcerting to a few. In David Pogue's recent post for the New York Times, The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality, he chronicles his experience in discovering how his readers and audience members sometimes fail to differentiate 'shades of grey' in digital copyright, and concludes "I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies’ problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?"

So, what does this have to do with education? Ethics in this digital age are something educators need to model if nothing else. Consider the teacher, young or old, who sometimes teaches with tools of a darker shade of grey:

* decides to play 'pirated' music from their iPod for dramatic effect;
* who 'shares' a home-burned DVD movie that dovetails with a current novel study;
* who embeds uncredited text into a PowerPoint presentation;
* who freely photocopies a published work for classroom reading;
* who uses images trawled from Google on a classroom website.

The responsibilities of modeling lawful use of creative works at the very least should require teachers to identify their sources prior to sharing them with a given class; and at best, would highlight the need for students to copyright and license their own creative works. Lawrence Lessig's recent TED talk, "How Technology is Being Strangled by the Law" highlights the fact that digital natives regularly mash media in creating new works, and that the laws governing copyright, help make us a society of law-breakers. Thanks to Wesley Fryer I've learned that a YouTube version of the talk is now available:



With cheating becoming the norm in society, and the 'find it in your hearts to forgive me' speeches filling the airwaves, educators have a golden opportunity to open classroom discussions on ethics in our time. Provided the classroom teacher is able to model and lead students in the creation of original 'non-infringing' content, the best way to move forward, may be for students to experience copyright first hand, in granting license to the non-commercial use of their own work through Creative Commons licensing.

Access an audio briefing on the Teacher 2.0 Podcast.

Google Holiday Map

The Google Blog has just posted a radical idea for bringing the world together in a compelling way over the next week or so. My Maps are Our Maps invites people to post stories, traditions and more in the form of photographs embedded into a Google Map. (Photos, or YouTube videos can be embedded; but content must be present on the World Wide Web prior to adding it to a Google map.)

The entry includes a link to a Google Map user guide. It will be very interesting to see how this map develops as the personal stories of global celebrations of Christmas, Chanukah and the New Year are added. This is one terrific example of Digital Storytelling!

If only educators had known about this before the end of school for the holiday break...? Certainly there are other classroom and community applications for such a project. It is an engaging idea that can be scaled from classroom, to school, to community, to city, to state/province, to country, to the global community. I'm guessing we'll soon see more than few educational adaptations of this idea... A few of my own ideas are on today's Teacher 2.0 Podcast.

Found one! A local holiday Christmas lights map! This map highlights outstanding light displays in Lakeland Florida, spring home of the Detroit Tigers:

Linear Brains and Soft Returns

One autumn morning in 1999, I had the opportunity to attend a hands-on workshop to learn how to use Microsoft Office. I walked away learning only one new skill, but it has saved me innumerable frustrations with aligning text in a wide range of computer programs. The skill, was the soft return. You may already know that using the return/enter key, along with the shift key, ensures that text wraps onto the next line (as opposed to beginning a new paragraph), but you may be surprised at how many keyboarders are unaware of this command. That one tip, made the 90 minute workshop worthwhile for me. Since that day, I've used the 'soft return' as a gauge for the usefulness of a professional development workshop.

Uh Oh! Students are learning on their own every day! Whether learning to use MS Office, or producing content for a social networking site, independent learners often live in ignorance of their own learning gaps. Consider this fact amidst the reality that many young people are learning online skills before their teachers have even heard of the technologies, and we have a problem not easily rectified!

How can educators provide thoughtful advice to digital natives in this reality? We can't... Unless we get learning ourselves! Teachers need to experience the tools over time in order to understand their appeal, and to consider ways of harnessing these tools for educational purposes.

But first, what hurdles must be overcome? I can think of a few:

Hurdle #1: Training on the use of Web 2.0 tools, needs to be done in an environment that suits the 'linear brains' of experienced teachers.

Hurdle #2: Techno-literate teachers are hard to come by! With few educators (and fewer administrators?) having the skills to lead such training, it will be challenging to move forward.

Hurdle #3: Late to the party, teachers will struggle to gain the respect of more experienced students.

With support from Mike Wesch and his students at Kansas State University, consider this soft return on how writing is different in the world of the Web:

Let's Meet Them on the Hills

I'd like to share with you a metaphor for Web 2.0 and other e-Learning tools:

The story begins in my hometown of Windsor, Ontario, where late in the summer of 2007, city workers saw the need to remove the lone hill in Memorial Park. Those unfamiliar with the geography of southern Ontario, might be interested to know that the extreme southern leg of the province is FLAT. Thanks to the same glaciation that fed the great lakes thousands of years ago, the land is flat, but fertile.

So flat is the area, that the city council had more calls in sadness and frustration at the loss of the hill, than had been experienced by elected officials in recent memory... Which is why, in the fall of 2007, the hill was rebuilt!



To me, the interesting thing about this hill, is that it drew people to the area. It is no coincidence that this photo taken shortly after the hill was rebuilt, has been christened with a picnic table (no doubt by energetic teens in the neighbourhood).

FACT #1: E-learning tools, Social Networking sites and Web 2.0 products draw people to use the World Wide Web. Whether out of curiousity, or as a meeting place, these 'virtual hills' serve important purposes, and as soon as they are built, people find them, and begin using them! It's a fact that the first reaction of 'supervisors' to new technologies is to block access; but eventually, (too often after a number of years!) the value of the tool seems to win out.

Hills seem to draw attention and people no matter how large or small. in August of 2007, the pile of dirt pictured below was added to the park across the street from my home. Within hours, young people from the neighbourhood had built a motocross challenge area. Taking the picnic table and spare planks from garages nearby, the park had a new, 'most popular spot'. Even though this park boasts a soccer field, a baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a child's playground and tennis courts, the final weeks of summer saw young people gravitate to the small pile of dirt in far greater numbers than any of the other attractions.




FACT #2: No matter how insignificant technological learning tools appear to adult educators, young people will enthusiastically join in using these tools... Often to the point of ignoring all types of traditional learning resources.


Now that winter has come to Canada in the form of great amounts of snow, the community toboggan hill has become the recreation centre for the community. Now that the patches of dirt can no longer accommodate bicycles, the 'X-games' fans decided that hills could benefit from the addition of some creative accents.



Fact #3: The use of the Read/Write Web can be hazardous! One should not dive into using evolving e-learning tools until he/she has taken the time to use the tools... and perhaps the more basic tools that might lead one to consider newer tools. Beyond the risks teachers need to take in trying new 'tricks', these new Web tools pose perils of which we need to be aware. These hazards are often the ones that grab the most headlines, even though the rich learning opportunities afforded by these tools are worthy of their own attention.

Hills and e-Hills were both meant to be climbed. When new hills or e-hills pop up on the horizon, they will draw the attention of young people in particular. Educators need to be prepared to meet the students who attempt to scale these hills. Now that I think of it, maybe it was a teacher who chose to put that picnic table on top of the hill in Memorial Park...

The Podcast version of this story is now available in iTunes! You can also click here to access the Teacher 2.0... the audio version!

Networks over Nodes

A few hours with Will Richardson spread over the past few days in London, helped me feel for the first time in a long while that "I'm not alone!"

In my work as an e-learning teacher and consultant, I was already aware of del.icio.us, Twitter, WetPaint, blogs, wikis and the many GoogleTools we tabbed through to consider the salient points of building networks; New to me was the fact that these many tools could be networked themselves, drawing upon common content courtesy of RSS.

Even so, what stood out most powerfully for me, was the fact that so many present in the room had so few questions about the relevance of what we were doing. Even Will's 'wait time' failed to illicit many questons or comments, due in large part to the fact that so many of us were on the same wavelength. I was physically immersed in a community who not only 'got it', but seemed to agree that we had to do what we could to connect with one another, and to bring others along for the ride in harnessing the tools.

Will's blog post of today put it very well I think:

It’s different now, somehow, than it was a year ago. It’s more immersive. It all feels deeper, closer somehow. Even more important. Maybe it’s just the glow of the prospect of being home for a month. Or the buzz of spending a couple of days with some folks who seemed to, on some level, get the fact that this really is about more than learning the tools. It’s about creating connections, intellectual connections, for sure, but potentially more.

In a year that I've traveled a fair bit in promoting e-learning across southern Ontario, I appreciated the fact you took leave of those closest to you, to assist others in strengthening their own professional and personal networks. You may not have been the first to state that "The network is more powerful than the node." but you were the first in a long while to engage this learner in high level thinking about the collaborative use of the read-write web!