Learning On The Job

I have a confession to make: When looking over the 23 Things, there are only a handful of things that I don’t already feel like I have some sort of comfort with. I blog, I tweet, I wiki, I have a Personal Learning Network that I am continuously cultivating to suit my needs and interests. And I have firsthand experience as to how the collaborative nature of the read/write web has changed me as a teacher.

As an L^3 (LifeLong Learner; I’m a math teacher, give me a break!), I harness the power of Web 2.0 on an hourly basis. If I have blog questions, I tweet an Edublogs guru. If want to talk politics or pedagogy or sports or the joys of international living, I connect with intrepidteacher or MsMichetti. And I’m constantly reading the thoughts and blogs of some of the most influential 21st C. educationalists around. To say that I learn more from the people in my computer than the people in my building would be a gross understatement.

As a teacher, wikis allow me to encourage collaboration and independence between my students. Creative Commons licensed photos allow my students to ethically find images to support their work. YouTube gives me a library of media that can be used for business or pleasure.

Web 2.0 is just awesome (boom de ya da, boom de ya da!).

image: idn_web_rots by Rodrigo Vera

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Morpheus came to UNIS last weekend…

You remember The Matrix, right? (If you don’t, maybe we shouldn’t be friends. It’s only one of the best movies ever.) Morpheus shows up in Mr. Anderson’s life, dazzles him with some crazy out-of-this world stuff, and then offers him a choice:

Neo, this is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Jeff Utecht dazzled the UNIS Middle School/High School staff with some pretty out-of-this-world stuff: wikis, podcasts, chatrooms used to take class notes, Chris Lehmann’s Ignite Philly presentation, interesting new brain research (and lots more) as well as, most importantly, a vision of what education can (must?) become in order to remain relevant.

I’m excited to see how many of my colleagues are taking the red pill. The Twitter population at UNIS has quintupled with people willing to give it a try. People are buzzing about external wikis and blogs (as opposed to our in-house SharePoint wikis and blogs). I don’t know how many have been created over the last 24 hours. I’m planning on hosting another “Tablet Support Group” meeting this week to allow people time to debrief and reflect. (While we did try to build in some reflection time in our days a la Learning 2.008, it just wasn’t enough!) There is a flame that has been lit and I’m hoping it turns into an uncontrolled Five Alarm Fire that consumes classrooms and students and teachers.

Of course, there will always be those content to take the blue pill and continue believing that what they are doing (which is the same thing they were doing 2, 5, 10, 20 years ago) is relevant and best-practice. What do we say to them? What can we say to them?

I wish, in this poor metaphorical exercise, I could say that I was Neo. I doubt that I am. I’m probably more like Tank or Dozer. But I’ve got my eye on a few who could be The One…

I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came to tell you how it’s going to begin. – Morpheus

(In future posts, I hope to dissect my role in presenting a few session at our PD weekend. I also reserve the right to use “Edu-Matrix” in the future, just in case. I just like the sound of it: Welcome to the Edu-Matrix.)