I love Firefox, don’t get me wrong. But what usually happens is I have about 15 tabs left at the end of the day, pages I want to blog about or add to del.icio.us or something. Since it’s Friday, I gotta shut down this machine, so here are some links to what’s still open on my screen:
Lawrence Lessig–about Google Print and copyright:
Thus the decision that will impact the Internet. A rich and rational (and publicly traded) company may be tempted to compromise - to pay for the “right” that it and others should get for free, just to avoid the insane cost of defending that right. Such a company is driven to do what’s best for its shareholders. But if Google gives in, the loss to the Internet will be far more than the amount it will pay publishers. It will be a bad compromise for everyone working to make the Internet more useful - and for everyone who will ultimately use it.
Radio Diaries–how teens can create audio stories
This Teen Reporter Handbook represents the collective knowledge of a long history of radio reporters, producers and storytellers. Special thanks to Jay Allison (and his “Tips for Citizen Storytellers”), David Isay and Ira Glass for all they have taught me.
Yellowikis–The yellow pages in wiki format. Oy.
Mainstream Media Meltdown II–The ship continues to sink.
Bloglines starter kit–Steve Dembo makes introducing others to Bloglines easy:
If you go into Bloglines, click on My Feeds and scroll down to the bottom of the left hand frame, you’ll see a link called “Tell a friend”. Clicking on it allows you to enter in a list of email addresses and to pick among blogs you currently subscribe to. It will send out an email with a link to bloglines that will allow someone to register a new account at bloglines prepopulated with your chosen blogs!
The banning blogs debate just gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) and regardless of how you feel, it’s a pretty good example of the kinds of conversations (distributed as they might be) that the Read/Write Web facilitates.
If you want more to think about, read Darren’s post today on “The Fear of Transparency.” And then read Miguel’s response and the others there. I left one too. This thread has shown up on about half a dozen blogs (if not more) and it’s been intruiging to watch as the different tentacles have evolved. It’s work, but it’s worth it.
I’m only going to add one more piece to this. We’ve been talking about how blocking blogs from students may (or may not) protect students. But we haven’t talked much about how blocking blogs from teachers affects us all. Here’s a snip from Miguel at Bud Hunt’s blog that really stuck in my brain:
To deal with the trust issue, I agree completely. I have made these points myself. We just don’t trust our teachers–to run their computers, to teach information literacy, etc. In Districts with integrated learning systems, lock-step scope and sequences that must be followed religiously, it’s clear they are not trusted to even teach. The reasons that happens are legion, but I’m sure you can concede the point that trust is not something teachers enjoy universally in the United States…
It’s simply tragic to me that Miguel can’t access Darren’s blog to comment back because he’s blocked from doing so, that the teachers in his district are denied access to potentially millions of sources of knowledge that, even if their students can’t access it, they can use to supplement what they teach and make it relevant. Worse, it’s tragic that until the district educates its teachers in information literacy, the teachers aren’t even being trusted to make good decisions about the questionable content that may crop up. Even scarier is that that sentiment seems to be widespread.
That’s not how it feels here. And while the many teachers I’ve had a chance to talk to may not have been as tech or Web savvy as they would have liked, I can’t imagine the vast majority of them wouldn’t have known instinctively how to keep their kids safe and teach them something in the process. If that’s incorrect, we’re in a lot bigger trouble than I thought.
So I’ve been thinking more about the whole “connective writing” idea and its potential importance as a unique genre of writing in this “new” Web environment. They way it’s framed in my brain, it’s a type of writing that is inspired by reading and is therefore a response to an idea or a set of ideas or conversations. It is writing that synthesizes those ideas and remixes them in some way to make them our own and is published to potentially wide audiences. Because it is published, it is writing that then becomes a part of a larger negotiation of a truth or knowledge that is evolving in the larger network. And finally, it is writing that is written with the expectiation that it too will be taken and remixed by others into their own truths by this continuous process of reading, thinking, writing (and linking), publishing and reading some more.
As I’ve thought about this, one of the key ingredients has been David Weinberger’s idea that texts no longer have value based on what they contain but on what they connect to. So, now that we can publish easily, now that markets or schools or (your plural noun here) are conversations, now that paper is becoming more and more irrelevant as a communication platform, we need to repurpose our texts (in whatever medium) from being simple containers of ideas into being complex connectors of ideas. To me, that represents a very significant shift.
In the last couple of days, a number of people have pointed to a great article at Kairos titled “Why Teach Digital Writing?” that begins to get to this idea of connective writing:
Computer technologies allow writers with access to a computer network to become publishers and distributors of their writing. And chances are they will get feedback, sometimes immediately. Therefore, audiences and writers are related to each other more interactively in time and space. Writers can easily integrate the work of others into new meanings via new media and rescripting of old media—text, image, sound, and video—with a power and speed impossible before computer technologies. The depth and breadth of this type of collaboration—both implicit (“borrowing” from others) and complicit (communities of writers)—may be one of the most significant impacts of computer technologies on the contexts and practices of writing. This context presses up against larger issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, access, credibility of sources, and dissemination of information
At some point, we’re all going to have to shift our thinking about some of the ideas in that last sentence. (Talk about a disruption.) But on the current topic, here’s the money quote:
When we put it all together, the ability to compose documents with multiple media, to publish this writing quickly, to distribute it to mass audiences, and to allow audiences to interact with this writing (and with writers) challenges many of the traditional principles and practices of composition, which are based (implicitly) on a print view of writing. The changing nature and contexts of composing impacts meaning making at every turn. [Emphasis mine.]
There’s more here too, much more, that I will get to at some point. But I’m thinking about how we begin to move our students, young students even, away from container texts to connector texts, about how we start to prepare them for a world of conversations (as David Warlick implores) and negotiations and meaning making instead of meaning taking.
And, almost more importantly, I’m wondering how we move our teachers to doing this as well.
