Woke up to Patrick Higgins in my reader this morning, a School 2.0 proponent whose recent levelheadedness has spared the readers of this blog my School 2.0 sniping for at least a coupla days.

… in all of our post-NECC hysteria and school change exuberance, are we beginning to forget our stakeholders? As I prepare for next school year by looking back at this past one, I can see bits and pieces of this mentality in my actions and interactions with people. “This is where we are going–jump on or you will be irrelevant!”

He links up Steve Dembo also:

After reading a ton of blog posts from NECC and EduBloggerCon, I’m starting to wonder if We (Edubloggers) are getting a little egotistical. WE get it, THEY don’t. And if people did things our way, then we’d all be driving flying cars. But WE are a distinct minority.

It doesn’t really concern me if any of their self-doubts are valid. That the question “how are we coming off right now?” has been asked at all brings me relief I can’t describe at 06h23.

Patrick sees this as the movement’s new direction and that makes me pretty excited. I realize that this school change movement entails (naturally) an amount of disgust for where schools are now but that same disgust has been misdirected at a lot of teachers whose only crime has been functioning competently inside the only system they know. *self-pitying whimper* Point is: there’s gonna remain a lot of legroom in the bandwagon until more School 2.0-ists start asking themselves that same question.

Related:

1. Scott Elias and Todd Seal‘s recent tech manifestos.
2. And just for good measure, though of only the barest relation to any of this, Mark Stock’s LeaderTalk post, Everything I Needed To Know About Schools I Learned By Being A Superintendent Of A Few.
3. Been a great morning for reading, team. Thanks for that.

A bigger boy once told me I should reply to as many comments as possible both to promote dialogue, which seems to be near the heart of this blogging thing, and to kick up my Technorati ranking, which is, of course, the literal heart of this blogging thing.

I let ’em get away from me in the last post but the back-and-forth has been supremely satisfying without my input.

What I dig about what’s happening in there, as opposed to what I typically encounter and what typically frustrates me around the edublogsphere, is the commenters’ redefinition of purpose. Blogging, wiki-ing, Skyping, Second Life-ing, etc-ing, so often seem to be ends and goals unto themselves. (ie. the recent and totally-outta-touch Second Life promo; “We need to get these kids out of lectures and into their own content management systems.”)

In the comments, the goal has become Engagement By Any Means Necessary. In the comments, I’ve found blogs, wikis, podcasts, PowerPoint, lectures, electric sharpeners, manual sharpeners all wrested from their pedestals and put into a box more appropriately labeled “tools.”

(more…)

… however we’re defining “next-gen” nowadays. Oh and I’ve met Darren, who’s good people.

I only ask on account of my impression that math, maybe more than any other secondary subject, lends itself least to this self-directed, participatory culture promoted by the next-gen crowd. Not unrelatedly, liberal arts bloggers (English and Social Science, specifically) outnumber us by a pretty wide margin.

It should go without saying that lecturing isn’t necessarily an effort to make the teacher feel smarter, more powerful, to subjugate her kids, or any of the other whack motivations next-gen teachers throw around in an concerted effort to get uninvited from my birthday party.

(more…)