My last full day here in Australia before the long trip home tomorrow. I get my day back, but who knows how long it will be before I get my body clock back. Last summer it took almost two weeks for me to get straight. Tips anyone? (Be nice.)

Haven’t had time to think much of this through, so excuse the relatively thin thinking. (Feel free to poke holes in it, as always.)

I’ve visited a couple of pretty interesting schools during my visit, one that’s in the process of being built, another that’s been around for 30 years, both different in their design. The new school, a high school, will be one built on open spaces for learning, project based learning concepts, individualized learning plans and very different roles for teachers and classrooms. The spaces have been designed with the great thinkers in mind, DaVinci and Einstein spaces, spaces that on blueprint at least offer up a great deal of potential for creativity and independence and passion based learning. Arts are embedded in the curriculum, and there is a really different concept of assessment. With any luck, I’ll be writing more about this place in the near future.

The other school was out in the country, surrounded by fields filled with cows and chickens and pigs. It was a small, PreK-6 school where the classrooms had all sorts of angles and skylights and patterns. Everywhere you look there is evidence of performance learning. Every classroom has a kitchen where kids do a lot of cooking. Outside, playground spaces are performance spaces as well. And the kids tend to the livestock and the farm as well as the school. I loved the feel.

Technology plays a role in both of these schools, though the roles are different to be sure. The high school will be a 1-1 school. The other is expanding the access of computers to its kids. Both are ripe for the ways in which technology can supplement real learning in the classroom, not just information processing. Obviously, there is much more about the culture and the infrastructure and the climate that goes into all of this.

The early thinking that’s evolved from those visits for me is this: we have been living in a world with pretty much one, ubiquitous model for schools for a long time now. This strikes me every time I take off on a plane to somewhere and am able without any trouble to pick out the school buildings we’re flying over. They’re all at right angles, with baseball and football fields nearby. The sizes and number of buildings vary, but it’s rare that I see yellow school buses parked next to anything that looks like something other than a factory.

In my own thinking about what schools might become, I’m realizing that I’ve been thinking that this old model is going to turn into a different model. But what’s really going to happen, I think, is that we’re about to explode into many different models. Obviously, this may not happen with any great momentum until we free up our ideas about assessment and learning culture, neither of which is an easy road. But we do need to find ways to support more unique, passion-based schools, places that like our kids, come in all shapes and sizes. I can’t remember when he said it, whether blog or e-mail, but Tom Hoffman reminded me a while ago that we have a lot of different models out there already, many of which are successful in their own right. And as we move away from that one factory model, we need to be open to whatever types of new models might evolve.

(Photo “old classroom” by shuichiro.)

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Some random observations of my first few days in Oz:

First, how is it Qantas can serve a free hot meal and free beverages on a 55 minute trip from Melbourne to Sydney when most US airlines I fly on can barely provide a cold, stale sandwich on a cross country flight? It’s also cool, by the way, that the people meeting you off the flight can do so at the gate instead of being relegated to baggage claim. Overall, flying has been much more pleasant here, kiss of death I know for tonight’s flight back to Melbourne.

Surprisingly, what hasn’t been great is the Internet. The connection at my workshops thus far has been spotty or nearly non-existent, and buying it in airports or hotels is insanely expensive. From everything I’ve heard from folks here and others answering questions on Twitter, access is very uneven and, in general, pricey. In fact, many state right out that they are worse off than some third world countries in the connection respect.

As always, the Aussies that I’ve met have been exceedingly generous, helpful, and complimentary. Just like our trip here last year, I’ve felt very welcomed. It’s definitely a place that I would highly recommend making a journey to, despite the fact that our currencies have almost reached parity making things a bit more expensive here than in the past. (Obviously, that’s the case for us Yanks no matter where we go these days.)

While the new government has allocated some significant funds to getting all high school students on a computer in short order, the amazing thing from what I hear is those computers are going to be desktops. Just as in the states, there is not a lot of vision at the top in terms of where to spend technology dollars and what the future might look like.

My “Small World” moment came when my phone suddenly rang and it was Tess calling from back home. Nothing special these days, I know, but a first for me. I just can’t get my brain around how many wireless signals we must be floating in if her phone call found me here in Sydney. Amazing.

And one last: when I was in Brisbane the other day, I was walking down the street when I saw a long line slinking around the corner, dozens of people queued up to get, believe it or not, Krispy Kreme donuts. I kid you not. People were walking out of the store with boxed dozens of the things, and apparently, it is the latest American sensation to hit the continent. Let’s hope it’s not followed by those other sensations that we’re getting more and more famous for: obesity and diabetes.

Finally, one very cool moment: when in my keynote I was discussing the fact that my kids had been taught to use Scratch by Neil Winton’s son Andrew from Scotland during one of our “extended classroom” sessions, it turned out that Neil and Andrew were watching live from Scotland. I only wish I would have known when it happened; what a great model-able moment that would have been.

I’ll try to carve out a few more observations this weekend before my final presentation in Melbourne on Monday. Then back to the states on Tuesday.

In case anyone is interested, my keynote was Ustreamed here, and the other sessions are on this page. Enjoy!

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From the “Circling the Wagons Department” it seems the New York City Department of Education has laid down the law about employees referencing their blogs in their e-mail signatures. For some reason, letting others know that your are a blogger is highly problematic, and the city is providing disclaimer language for anyone in the department who blogs and who comments on other’s blogs. (Hadn’t heard that one before.) As Lisa Nielsen, the manager of professional development for the Department of Instructional Technology writes on her blog, it’s not a direction that serves the DOE.

I find this particularly upsetting because…having a blog is a great way to get the digital footprint conversation going as well as model best practices for using 21st Century tools to build professional learning communities and personal learning networks that support the work we do. In fact, I think it would be terrific if all educators with professional blogs celebrated and shared their work in their email signatures.

No doubt, employee blogs can be problematic and are not always to be celebrated. And I do recognize the need to monitor what people in your organization are doing. But the reality here is this: educators in New York City who want to connect and share with other educators around the world are going to do that. Some of them will do it well, others, notsomuch. Celebrate the former, educate the latter. Learn from the experience and from the sharing that takes place. In the end, this is once again just lazy policy in action.

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Just wanted to point briefly to a new ethnographic study on young kids in online social environments that was released this week by Consumer Reports Web Watch and the Mediatech Foundation, which is the brainchild of my good friend Warren Buckleitner (and for which I serve, badly I might add, as vice president of the board.) The study looked at kids 2-8 and asked parents to create video journals of their children’s use of sites like Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, videos which were then analyzed for a number of different outcomes.

The bottom line:

We discovered that the digital world offers a wealth of opportunity for young children to play and learn. But even in this small sample of 10 families we found–too easily, in several circumstances–repeated examples of attempts to manipulate children for the sake of commerce.

And here are the key findings:

• Even the very young go online.
• The Internet is a highly commercial medium.
• Web sites frequently tantalize children, presenting enticing options and even threats that their online creations will become inaccessible unless a purchase is made.
• Most of the sites observed promote the idea of consumerism.
• Logos and brand names are ubiquitous.
• Subtle branding techniques are frequently used.
• The games observed vary widely in quality, in educational value, and in their developmental match with children’s abilities.

The entire study, “Like Taking Candy from a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments” (pdf) is available for download. And, you can see excerpts from the video journals on YouTube.

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Thanks to a short post from Lawrence Lessig (now on his regularly scheduled month long blog hiatus, btw) I’m using Apture for the first time to demo what I think is a powerful new potential for blogging. (Click on Lessig’s name above to get a sense.) In an amazingly easy way, I’m now able to add all sorts of multimedia context to whatever I am writing about, in a way that transcends just “regular old” linking. It’s one of those tools that immediately made me want to be back in a classroom with students, learning with them the ways in which writing and hypertext continue to evolve.

Apture allows you to easily add video, audio, text and almost anything else from Web sources or even local files as a pop-up to whatever word or phrase you designate in your post. So, as I write this, I’m thinking about what I can come back and add context to after I publish it. (That’s how Apture works, post publication.) If for instance, I was writing about the latest education news here in Brisbane or in Australia, it’s exceedingly easy for me to provide all sorts of relevant content that pops up right here on the page (as I’m sure you’ve noticed already.) What’s interesting me right now is how this makes me think very differently about the process, and how I wish, actually, that I could do this before I publish. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

While I think this is an amazing new tool, I’m sure it could just be added noise on some level. But regardless, I love these added pieces to play with and to experiment with. It should push all of us to think further about how writing and reading literacies in online, read/write Web environments might differ from traditional paper.

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This isn’t news to many, but this morning, the band Nine Inch Nails released its newest collection of music this morning as a free download with a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike license. I’m not sure how realistic the all free music model is, but I really hope the “take this and make your own music” model sticks. It’s a great entry point for teaching kids about intellectual property and copyright, creativity, publishing, collaboration, etc. Obviously, it could mean kids making their own music videos, digital stories, etc.

Since I’m pretty ignorant in the music mashup process, however, (as well as many other things,) I’m wondering what makes it possible for anyone to add other vocals or instrumentals to these downloads. Is it the format? And can anyone point to a process that steps one through how to do it?

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If I had wireless, I’d be Tweeting “On a Plane” for the next 22 hours or so. Heading to Australia for eight days of blogvangelizing in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Three conferences and a day at a school district. Should be fun, but I’m dreading getting on this 757 I’m staring at.

At least my Google Docs and my Google Reader are both operable at 40,000 feet.

See you “down under”…

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Kind of spur of the moment I decided to UStream all of my presentations at MICCA in Baltimore, and in the midst of doing so noticed some cool upgrades, the best of which is the ability to “cohost.” (Notice the little link in the bottom left of the picture.) This may not be all that new since I haven’t played much of late, but it was fun to bring all sorts of willing experimenters from the studio audience in to play. Talked to bicyclemark in Amsterdam, a classroom teacher in Wichita, a technology specialist in the UK, and some students in Montgomery, Alabama, pictured here. The folks who were watching seemed to indicate that the sound and picture quality were pretty good, despite some spotty bandwidth yesterday. The only glitch was that when I tried to record those interviews, the “cohost” contributions didn’t stick. It was just me talking and listening, making little sense.

I have to say that UStream has become quite the eye-opener for people in my presentations. It’s definitely an interesting way of positioning the drastic publishing shifts that we are experiencing, and to give a bit of context to the “call for conversations” around them. And on a personal note, it is great to be able to watch/listen to presentations while multitasking in the background.

Now if only UStream would archive the chats…

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So it’s official. Clay Shirky is my new hero, right up there with Lessig in terms of spelling things out in ways that just make so much sense, and that actually cause butterflies in my stomach when my brain fully wraps around an idea and owns it. I loved his book, Here Comes Everybody, and I love the book blog almost as much, especially when he writes stuff like this.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

It’s an amazing essay that positions this shift just right, that we’re waking up from a collective TV watching bender that has created a “cognitive surplus” that’s just waiting to activated, and that we’re seeing the beginnings of that right now in our ability to participate. And that changes everything.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

It made me think of George Siemens’ recent post where he writes about being unable to state clearly exactly what it is that’s happening right now.

While people have always been able to do this, the scope and ease of collaborating and (hopefully) creating a multi-perspective information source is now greater than before. It just feels different to me. Like we’re still going through many of the motions I recall going through in the past with regard to information creation/sharing…but something fundamental is different. Can’t quite put my finger on it…

Shirky might say we’re shaking off the hangover and discovering a larger purpose for what we are creating and sharing. It feels different because it’s starting to feel like an expectation, not simply an option. As Shirky says

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Great, great essay. And lots of butterflies.

UPDATE: Just saw a tweet from Arthus that led to the video of Shirky’s talk. Cool!

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Still digging through my stack of reading that I neglected, and this Bob Herbert column from the Times last week bubbled up.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

I think that the lack of discussion about education in this election cycle is what is depressing me most about the state of change right now. We’ll be watching reruns of Paula Abdul’s “meltdown” on Idol last night for at least another week, or wasting even more time on Rev. Wright, but the idea of having a serious sit down about education that involves the interested parties (read: EVERYONE) just can’t happen.

I will say however, that if we are going to measure the success of education in America by how many people can accurately date the Civil War or identify Adolf Hitler, we may not be ready for the real conversation that has to take place.

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From the “And These Teachers Got Hired How? Department” comes this downright scary quote in a Washington Post article on teachers with Facebook/MySpace sites:

In some cases, teachers apparently didn’t mind that their Web sites were raunchy and public — at least until a reporter called. Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”

Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Um…that kind of says it all, I think.

So who’s to blame? The schools that hired them? Their preservice programs? Their parents? Society? Technology? Or…

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A couple of moments from my short hiatus have been occupying my thoughts the last few days. The first was the opportunity to listen to and later briefly meet Sir Ken Robinson at an arts conference I presented at in New Jersey two weeks ago. The other was listening to the final presentations of my Seton Hall Ed.D. students as they talked about their technology journeys this year.

What strikes me is how little if anything seems to be changing in public schools, despite what I think are some pretty compelling cases for change that are out there. (I know, I know…back to this again.) Let me tell you a couple of stories.

A building principal at a small public school in upstate New York told us at Seton Hall that just this year, when she wanted to begin using a flash drive on the computer at her school, she was told she couldn’t by the IT person in the district who was afraid that doing so would cause all sorts of havoc on the network. Finally, after some begging, the IT person agreed to open up one computer in the library for all flash drive use in the school. And not for kids.

Another building principal read a letter that his IT person wrote to his board that included a bulleted list of reasons why the district should not pursue the purchase of laptops for the school, everything from laptops are just a craze, to laptops get stolen, to the expense of shipping and handling . Not only that, but no school in his district can move ahead of any other school when it comes to technology. So if one school wants laptops, but another school doesn’t, then neither school (or any other school in the district, for that matter) can get them.

(Of course, there is the flipside as well, the districts that have the ability (or the connections) to create media centers and mobile media labs that will immerse their kids in the content creation and media literacies that they’ll need to compete. The gulf between the two is striking.)

What’s shocking in these stories is that it’s not just about control of the technologies in the classroom with students. It’s about control of top administrators in their own personal use of technology. I mean, if we’re just now letting principals use flash drives in their schools, how long will it take to get to where kids and teachers are creating and connecting? And what, in the end, does all of this control, which no doubt washes down to the students, teach them about using self control? That’s the hardest part of this for me to get to at times. The only ways our kids will learn to navigate the world is if we give them the tools and opportunities to use them in their practice. How can they learn that self-control if we’re always controlling everything? What a horrible lesson.

In his keynote, Sir Ken said something along the lines of “we have to stop talking about school reform and start thinking about school ‘transform’.” And that transformation has a lot to do with ceding control of so much of what we currently do. He also noted that instead of an industrial model, we need an “agrarian model,” one where instead of standardizing every output, we nourish the environment to allow each to grow at it’s own, most effective pace. The picture he painted looked so different from the pictures being painted by those administrators. Hard to see when, if ever, the two become one.

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So after a couple of weeks of info-learning fatigue, I’m feeling like I’m on the verge of crawling my way up out of the pit. Not sure I’m fully there yet, and the fact that I’m staring at one night at home in the next two weeks in the face (10 days in Australia upcoming), I’m not sure when I’ll be fully healed. But taking a couple of weeks basically “off” has helped.

Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it. In fact, it was pretty peaceful to not be a part of the conversation, to not really care what I was wasn’t learning. I’d echo a lot of the reflection that Jeff gives to his most recent purposeful unplugging, even though I just lapsed into mine. (He scheduled his; my brain felt like jello.) As Jeff says, “There are days I’m tired of being tied to technology.” And I would add, there are days I’m tired of learning. I used to feel more guilt about that. These days, much less. And I’ve been thinking about this classroom a bit differently of late. It’s been feeling a bit competitive, and in a weird (and somewhat ironic) way, a bit too friendly. It’s a much more intense place than it was seven years ago.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t stop learning. Not at all. It’s just that my learning times were scheduled. A couple of day long sessions with teachers learning their fears. Teaching two days at Seton Hall to school administrators, learning how difficult their technology lives at school are. Twelve basketball games in two weekends, learning a lot about my kids, about how resilient they are, about how hard they’re willing to work, and how different it is to watch my own children compete as opposed to the thousands that I had coached over the years. A day at the Global Green Expo (Wendy’s site design, btw) learning how dire things really are. And much more stuff that the network simply cannot provide.

But that scheduled-ness was the key. (Funny how opposite that sounds from Jeff.) It felt soooo goooooood to be out of the “grab-15-minutes-here-and-there” mode of learning that my life has become these days. To some extent, it’s hard to avoid that these days. But the problem is there are never enough 15 or 30 or 60 minute chunks these days, are there?

I did manage a Tweet about this a couple of days ago, something along the lines of “how long has it been since you totally turned off for a week?” I got about 30 replies. Most couldn’t remember when. Many were wistful of such an occurrence.

So yeah, learning can happen 24/7/365 these days. Don’t have to be connected to do it though. No news there I know, just a friendly reminder to myself.

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Before I pull myself the last couple of steps up from my recent blogging funk, a quick item from the “Things I Wished I’d Known for the Last Two Years Department.” My major, major, major frustration with Google Reader has always been what I thought was the inability for me to mark a post “unread.” As with my practice in Firefox when I leave like 87 tabs open, by work flow is such that I just like to keep alive all the potentially good stuff I scan through when I don’t really have time to read it. The “Add a Star” feature in Reader has never done the job, and I have been staring at the stupid “Mark as Read” button (which I have never understood the purpose of) wishing I could turn it into “Mark as UNread.” No amount of staring helped.

So today, I find out all you have to do is hit the “M” key on a post to keep it active in Google Reader. I know, I know…I should have spent more time on the shortcuts page.

Not sure what it says that my life suddenly feels a whole bunch better right now. Sad, I know.

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From CNN:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

No wonder we take kids’ cell phones away from them in school…

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From “Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace” (600+ page .pdf) comes this passage by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation:”

Published knowledge is old knowledge: The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledege tailored to a new situation, in real time.”

While this is in the context of national security and intelligence, I think it’s applicable to the ways in which we think about networked learning, which is why we need to publish what we know and share it widely.

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