Standards do not teach.

Standards do not limit what can be taught or learned.

Standards do not dictate how anything will be taught or learned.

Standards do not cause, create, require, or otherwise have any sort of dependency relationship with standardized tests.

The standards argument ticks me off. I love standards. I love standards so much that I hate when they are misused and misrepresented. Of late, they are being misrepresented by teachers, by the very people who should understand them the most.  Standards should be tools that feel so familiar in a teacher’s hand that the exact bundle the teacher is thinking of can be easily selected without looking or stumbling. In fact, to the onlooker, it wouldn’t appear that anything standards-related was happening.

The misrepresentations I’ve been hearing would lead the observer to believe standards dictate that on the third Monday of the school year, every second grade math teacher will lead the students in reciting addition facts; and on the 30th Monday, the students will, in choreographed unison, draw and count arrays while intoning, “Three plus three plus three is nine. Three times three is nine.” I exaggerate. I hope I exaggerate.

In truth, standards do not say when or how skills should be taught. Curriculum says when and how. I repeat, standards do not say when or how.

Standards tell a parent, “Hey, your kid should know how to add a few numbers together by the end of second grade, so it’s okay to challenge your kids to keep score in a short game.” Standards tell a third grade teacher that covering addition of two-digit numbers is a review topic at the beginning of the year, so they can confidently acquire more complex resources for the classroom. Standards tell the school librarian that these topics are definitely going to be covered, so it is worthwhile to invest in resources that support those topics. Standards tell a passionate parent or teacher that schools will need tools that support certain skills so that parent or teacher can start a business and count on making a living by providing a service that is needed. Standards are guidelines that everyone involved in education can count on and build on.

I’ve learned about standards in three completely different fields. First I studied education standards while getting my bachelor’s degree. I thought they were the greatest thing since toast (I still do). I wanted to walk into a classroom with them and say, “Hey, look what we have to learn this year! What amazing things do you want to do and create in order to learn them?” I pictured a student-run magazine like Elliott Wigginton’s class that started Foxfire. Or now when I imagine it, I think of the classes that have invented alternative energy sources. (Note: That’s not the exact example I was looking for–please reply with more awesome examples of what can happen in classrooms.)

“But wait!” says the skeptic, “What does running a magazine and engineering stuff have to do with standards?” Everything. The kids who started that magazine satisfied every requirement in their social studies, language arts, and math standards. Throughout the year, the teacher could have stopped the class and taught them a little about metacognition. He could have said, “Hey, remember those standards I said we needed to cover at the beginning of the year?” And the kids could have groaned and said, “Yeah, but do we really have to do them? We’re so busy running the magazine. We need to figure out how many pages it has to be, and which printer will cost less, and schedule interviews, and write and edit, too!” And while they were rattling that off, he could have been checking off standards. He could have said, “Look what you’ve learned! Did you even know that you were learning? This is what learning is supposed to be like. It’s exciting. It’s part of life. It’s something you’ll want to pursue every day forever.”

Standards are purposefully worded as blandly and neutrally as possible. Why? It may be easy to think that’s because the writers are prescribing that the topics be taught in the most bland way possible. But really, it’s because the writers are leaving room for the curriculum designers, teachers, and students to cover the standards in whatever way they think is best. This is what I learned about standards in my second field: architecture and engineering. I taught people to use software for writing building specifications, which from hereon out, I will call specs. Specs are incredibly lengthy documents detailing exactly how a building should be constructed. It describes the windows, the roofing materials, the plumbing, and so on, for parts of buildings I didn’t even know existed until I learned to teach that software. There are two kinds of specs: architecture-based and performance-based. Architecture-based specs say exactly what brand to buy and exactly how big to make it. Performance-based specs instead say, “Use a product that can handle this kind of foot traffic and provides this kind of feel to the room.” They do not specify how to meet the requirements, they only say what requirements need to be met. This leaves the architect with room to be creative and still guarantees the owners a space that will meet their needs.

Specs in architecture are not standards. Specs reference and depend on standards. Standards say that a two-by-four will measure 1.5″ by 3.5″ and that cables of a certain grade will be able to hold a load of this weight when installed using particular guidelines. In addition to specs and standards, there are codes. Codes require that buildings are able to keep inhabitants safe from whatever conditions are probable where the building is located. This includes using products and construction methods that handle hurricane winds, flooding, and earthquakes.

To me, education standards are similar to a combination of performance specs, standards, and codes. There is not a one to one correspondence between the fields, but the spirit of performance-based specs is what I believe is intended by the writers of educational standards. They do not specify the curriculum, location, tone, or time of the learning. They merely say, “By the end of second grade, kids should know what multiply means so that their next teacher can build on that knowledge.” The skeptic says, “And if they don’t know how to multiply, the teacher gets fired.” Only if the standards are misused. If a kid does not know what multiply means by the end of second grade, yes, it’s a symptom of something, but it’s not a diagnosis. It’s a symptom that the teacher, student, parents, and principle need to look at and address on a student-by-student basis. A teacher for whom standards are well-worn tools will be able to explain that the student has excelled here and here, but has not met this one here. The teacher can show what improvements were made and lay out a path the student can follow when the student is ready.

The third field in which I learned about standards is web design. They have just as passionate an argument about standards in their field as education does. In fact, you can almost replace “web” with “education” in the arguments and have a hard time telling which is which. The smartest people in web design, though, are arguing for web standards. They argue for them because following standards guarantees accessibility, which means all of your students can access knowledge. Web standards mean that no matter what tool you use to get to content, you can see the content, or hear it with a screen reader.

Standards are like a binding agreement, where teachers and administrators get together and say, “Yes, I believe it is important that students have these skills. We will do what we can to help students learn these skills.” If you don’t believe the standards require things that are important for students, then get involved in those standards. That’s how the people who write the standards got involved.

Thank you for reading my rant. I hope it wasn’t too preachy or snarky.

Let’s start with what’s often shared in the news: Video-game Ownership May Impair Kids’ Academic Achievement. This news article sums up a study on short term effects of game system ownership. The study is published in the Psychological Science Journal and only members can read it. So I’m not able to see how long “short term” is. Basically the blurb says they discovered the shocking news that if you give someone a gaming system, that person is going to play games on it, thereby spending less time doing other things they would have done without the new gaming system. They probably would have found similar results had they given these boys really interesting books to read, a new interesting museum to go to, or anything at all new that they were interested in. Think of anything new worth a couple hundred dollars that has entered your life. After you got it, did you spend more time with it for awhile than you did other things, perhaps causing some negative effects with the other things? Did the ‘new’ wear off after a bit so that it settled into a normal routine and you then focused on what you should have been doing again? Basically, without having read the actual study, it sounds to me like these kids and their video game systems were set up to fail.

I’m not saying there aren’t potential problems with time management where games are concerned. Almost Normal is an awesome web comic that explores time management issues with gaming. I’ve picked out a few of the strips below. Read what she writes about each strip, and read the comments from her readers to really understand where they all come from. The artist is a real gamer with real life goals that she is accomplishing.

• August 21, 2009: This strip introduces the characters pretty well.
• November 6, 2009: This illustrates the frustration and doubt everyone experiences about being able to accomplish their dreams or change the world. Gamers get that doubt, too. This is especially relevant to Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk about gamers. One of her points, and I think it’s the only one I disagree with, is that gamers believe they can change the world, but only a virtual world, not the real world.
• November 13, 2009: You can see here that all of her characters need stuff. This is one of the ways the game keeps players playing. David Wong compares video game design to Skinner box design to explain this.
• February 19, 2010: This one is for all the Farmville gamers you know, and it illustrates how many different responsibilities pull at our time, both in real life and virtual.

Reactions to Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk about gamers:

I agree with and learned so much from all but one sentence Jane McGonigal shares–the once where she says gamers believe they can change the world, but only a virtual world. I think she needs to meet some of the gamers that I know. These are people who believe they can change the world, and they do change the real world. I play with successful business owners, kids who start charity events to raise money for children’s hospitals, published and self-supporting artists and musicians, parents raising responsible and well-behaved kids, and lots of people who have day jobs to pay the bills and very fulfilling, creative hobbies in addition to playing games.

So why do we game? David Wong’s Skinner box analogy explains how the game meets a need for feedback, for our efforts to be rewarded. Jane McGonigal explains that we play to escape reality. These are definitely reasons why I play. It’s why I read. It’s why I do art projects. It’s why I go for a drive, go hiking, go biking, and dream of going on vacations. Working with reality can get frustrating. You work really hard to meet a goal and you can’t tell if you are making progress or going backwards, and the finish line can be years away. Around any corner, you can meet people who say you can’t succeed. Since I’ve started playing World of Warcraft (WoW), I find that at those times, I play. It’s a great break. I get rewarded. I can tell I’m making progress. I can team up with people to accomplish things none of us could do alone. After awhile, I re-energize and am ready to take on my real life goals again.

David Wong describes the light shooting from your body when you accomplish goals in game. This is my toon achieving the most difficult thing I’ve done in game so far:

This took a few months to accomplish and I am still really proud of it. Real life rewards very few people this way. In real life, I earn something to list on my resume or a good story to tell.

An author and game designer, Sirlin, shares a video of Jesse Schell’s 2010 DICE lecture describing an amazing world in which marketing takes over and rewards everyone for every little thing they do in real life. The video is at the top of the page and Sirlin’s analysis follows. He closes with, “Jesse Schell’s future is coming. How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?” So it seems that Jane McGonigal hopes for a world where we create games where people learn to live responsible lives by virtually exploring the consequences of doing otherwise. Jesse Schell thinks advertisers will control our reward systems and we will learn to live lives that buy the products they want to sell. Hopefully it will be a combination of the two, and we will also learn to be critical and question these reward systems.

These award-winning serious games include examples of what McGonigal wants to see in the future as well as many educational games. Each banner launches a video about the game.

Keith Devlin wants to build a virtual game on the scale of WoW that helps people learn to think mathematically. He thinks that commercial game developers will not be motivated to spend the necessary money to build an educational game. I’m not so sure that’s true. If it’s a good game, what geeky gamer doesn’t want to be in a world of math? I would play. In fact, I’m very tempted to buy an early reading program, ItzaBitza, because it’s just a really great game. Click the “Try ItzaBitza” button for a 15 minute free trial and you’ll see what I mean. I hope I can spend my gaming dollars to learn things like higher math, physics, and programming someday soon.

Edits: I updated this on Monday, March 22nd to add some formatting and adjust some words to make it a little more readable and to try to say what I mean more clearly. I’ll continue editing this in the future. I’m still analyzing all of these related sources and figuring out the points I want to make about them. Thank you for reading trudging through it in its current state.

Here are all the sessions I attended, my thoughts, and all the related resources I can find.

Dennis Small, CBAs for Washington’s EdTech Standards

I was interested in attending this because it was on assessment of standards. Standards tend to get a bad rap, and so does assessment, especially when it’s of standards. My analytical and organized instructional design soul cries out at these attacks. How can anyone say having standards is bad? How can anyone say assessing whether standards have been met is bad? You can say the standards are poorly written, poorly implement, poorly designed. You can say the assessment is poorly designed and unimaginative. But just because these things are so often done badly does not mean they, themselves, are bad. Standards are how you know what the goal is. Assessment is how you know you got there. Simple. Essential.

Anyway, I’ll tuck aside my little soapbox and write about the session.

Dennis Small is the Director of Educational Technology at OSPI (Washington State’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction). Tara Richerson actually did most of the presentation. First they discussed timelines and deadlines for when assessment of the standards would need to be developed. All of that sort of information is better accessed from OSPI than from my blog so I won’t go into it here.

I learned that 13 states assess educational technology literacy. Some assess it online, and only four assess it by embedding in content tests. Those four are the only ones that have it right, I think. Technology is nothing without content. No one uses technology that’s worth having standards written about it and assessing a person’s skills at using it just for the sake of using the technology. They use it to learn and to create. The best assessment is an authentic one, so embedding technology assessment into content assessments gives a chance of it being authentic.

The attendees were shown a tech standard and then given time to discuss how they would assess it. I chatted with a technology integrator who shared that his school’s problem was not how to assess technology, but rather that they were still discussing whether they should use it. My previous post has my impassioned response to that nonsense.

After the discussion, teachers shared some formative assessment techniques:

• When one student has a tech question, instead of answering, the teacher asks another student to answer.
• In a web design class, students blog their daily progress in a web design class.

Tara shared a quote that I love: “Give me enough evidence to convict you of learning.” I believe she cited a source, but I’m not finding it in a Google search.

I took a couple more notes via Twitter:

• Does there need to be an audience of the information that you organize–how do students prove they can organize ideas?
• How do we make the evaluation consistent from teacher to teacher and content to content. Evaluate “creative.”

One person’s definition of “organization” and “creativity” can be vastly different from another’s. The point of an assessment, though, is that any work will receive that same evaluation regardless of who is examining the evidence. The challenge is to design an assessment that effectively asks the learner to organized and creative, and that gives the viewer enough evidence to convict them of that. I find that exciting.

Keynote

The keynote was the same one I attended at FETC–a talk about the state of our environment from Philippe Cousteau. He’s awesome, amazing, and engaging, but is in no way what I expect for a keynote at an educational technology conference. I understand the economic reasons for the choice, but please, put someone up there to inspire teachers to integrate technology. His message is vitally important, but there are a lot of vitally important messages, and the one most relevant to an educational technology conference is the one on effective technology integration. /rant

Jennifer Gingerich, Digital Kits for Differentiation and Learning

Jennifer Gingerich is a technology coach for an Oregon school district. She shared a story about her transition from physical, topic-specific learning kits to digital ones. She used to collect materials on different topics that kids could handle and pass around in order to become familiar with the topics. When digital resources became available, she had a revelation that her kits could be digital and this is how she came to embrace technology (at least that’s how I remember it now, two weeks later). She shared that she wanted to help other teachers embrace this and had a tough time until she finally gave in and just gave them one to use. Then the teachers saw how great it was and asked how to make their own.

Some tips she shared were to create a folder structure in which no two folders have the same name. For example, at the top level, there would be folders for “Ocean” and “Oregon Trail”. Inside those, there would be folders for pictures, but they would not be called “Pictures”. They should be called “Ocean Pictures” and “Oregon Trail Pictures”. Having worked in a one-to-one computing situation before, this made total sense to me. When you’re trying to explain to 25 or 30 people to go to a particular folder, and you’re trying to walk around to make sure no one is lost, it’s so much easier if the window’s title bar has the full name of the folder. In Windows there are options to turn on the full path, but you’re not always in control of that setting, so it’s better to name the folders something that will quickly tell you that Lucy can’t find the picture of the flower because she’s in “Fish Pictures” instead of “Flower Pictures”.

She was an engaging and informative presenter, but I could not stay for the whole thing as there were many more presentations I wanted to see. Her website includes many more resources on this and other topics.

Randy Orwin, ePortfolios Using Open Source Software Called Mahara

At the district I used to work for, I got to participate in many conversations about the practicality and challenges of implementing ePortfolios. At first blush, they probably seem like a no-brainer to implement, but given a little time to think about legal and technical issues, they’re really quite complicated and easy to do very very wrong.

Mahara sounded pretty cool. Jason Neiffer liveblogged the session.

My Twitter notes:

• The portfolio is exportable and then viewable as a web page. The portfolio can travel with kids who leave the district.
• Also usable as a digital dropbox.
• Students can create views of their art that displays the sizes etc that they want.
• A teacher could assign making a view of their work for a specific purpose. The work exists once and can be used in many views.
• The student has complete control of what is published and who can see it.
• I recommend looking at Mahara of you are considering digital portfolios and want to allow your students a sense of ownership.

I’m not sure that I have much more than that to share. In summary, I was impressed and would really like to see this in the wild someday.

Okay, that’s all I can write tonight! And I decided that if that’s all I can write in one sitting, it’s probably more than you want to read in one sitting! So I’ll post more as I have time to write it. And oh, is there more!

My field’s pretty easy, though, compared to that of anyone in content. The days when the teacher was the gateway to knowledge are so long gone. Know it, accept it, and embrace it, teachers. Your students can hear straight from an astronomer about a discovery of a new star. They can read an original historical document. They can have a conversation with the president of another country. They can ask a professional mathematician about the practical applications of last night’s homework assignment. And they can do this without you ever knowing. You can’t stop it. It’s already happened. It’s happening now.

I was in a presentation where we were shown Wolfram Alpha doing math. If someone wants you to find x^2 sin(x) (whatever that is), type it into Wolfram Alpha and get all the data you could ever want and more. Every homework assignment I was ever given in math class can be done by simply typing it into Wolfram Alpha. Hmmm.

Know it. Accept it. Embrace it.

How cool! Math teachers, tell me you didn’t become a math teacher just to show kids how to follow the steps to answer a math problem the same way everybody else in the world was taught to solve it. What inspired you to become a math teacher? Now that Wolfram Alpha can do the basic stuff, can you do even more? If your students can find the answers there, can you teach them why the answers are worth finding?

Another presentation focused more on literature and history. There was a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. I don’t think I had ever heard about it before, but I learned it was pretty significant in women’s lib and labor laws. The presenter showed us so many resources available on this. If kids know how to search, they can find images, videos about it, interviews, building plans, and so much more. That’s just one little fragment of a content area. There is no way a teacher could be familiar with all of the resources available on that one event, much less the rest of topics in the curriculum, much less everything else that is relevant to the curriculum that didn’t fit into the plan for the year.

Not only was it the last presentation of the conference, but the sea of information that was available was so vast, I could see teachers thinking, “How can I possibly know all of this?” Does it help to think, “I can’t.” There is more information available in every subject area now, and more becoming available all the time, that no one can have a complete list. It’s impossible. Your students are going to find sources you have never seen before. Know that. Accept that. Embrace it. If your kids aren’t inspired to find things you have never seen before, are you teaching it well enough?

This is a big, stressful change. I hope you’ve made it already. If you haven’t, accept that you can’t stop it. There’s no going back. Even if all the access is shut down in a school, kids can get to all of this outside of school. The time when the school was the gateway to information is gone. Long gone. And that’s really pretty awesome. Help your kids find all of this, analyze it and evaluate it, and then teach them the inspiring things you never had time to teach before.

@cathig: This is the account I will follow people with, I think. This might change. I’m not quite sure how that will work. But basically, this is the consolidated ‘me’.

@cathig_edu: This will be the account from which I will post education and technology tweets.

@cathig_sci: This will be where I tweet about social gaming, comics, and other geeky things.

Why? Well, I attended NCCE this week in person. A week ago or so, someone I follow attended another conference and tweeted info as it went along, so I was kind of able to be there. I really appreciated it. I thought I would do the same thing for my followers from NCCE. The problem is that perhaps half of my followers are from my gaming side and don’t give a crap about what I think is important about educational philosophy and that sort of technology.

I resisted dividing my stream for personal identity reasons and for technical complexity. My personal reasons were just that this is me. I’m interested in all of this stuff, so here it all is. I didn’t like the idea of dividing ‘me’ into multiple boxes for people. But with a day or so of reflection and analysis, I came to the following conclusions:

• I already compartmentalize ‘me’. There are personal things I do not tweet or blog, and there are public things that I do tweet or blog.
• I already do not tweet a lot of things I would want to share with my gaming and comics followers because I do not want to annoy my education followers. My gaming and comics side is more personal and my education side, while still my personal passion, is more what I want to share as a professional.
• Most everybody is really complex, and very rarely is one person interested in everything another person is interested in. Most people are not like me. While I am really interested in hearing what a person has to say about almost anything they are passionate about, most people’s eyes glaze over when others geek out about things they aren’t interested in. For me, my eyes will glaze over when anyone starts talking about celebrities’ personal lives or reality TV. I’m just not interested. So if someone who posted mostly about education were giving a blow-by-blow tweet stream about whatever popular show, I’d be annoyed at the clutter in my stream.

So I came to an understanding on the personal side. It’s okay for people who choose to follow me not to want to follow all of me. Got it. Now for the technical problem. The folks at Twitter do not make it easy to have separate streams for people to follow. This problem spans most social networking sites, including Facebook. I’ve rarely touched Facebook in the past year because of this. News I want to share with my family is different from what I want to share with my friends and different from what I want to share with coworkers and different from what I want to share with whomever might want to hire me in the future (my current job ends every six months, so I have to expect that I will work somewhere else one day unless my employer can figure out how to make a commitment to people who want careers there). I understand and appreciate the integrity aspect–they want to be able to say that everyone with an account is a genuine, real person, not just a bunch of fake accounts created merely to deceive or entertain. We do need to be able to trust that we are interacting with real, honest people, not characters. But there has to be some way to easily have this integrity and allow people to share different information with different groups. I don’t need to know that my coworker hates gay people. While I am lividly opposed to that opinion, that should not be a factor in my workplace. I should not know who my boss is voting for. My boss should not know who I am voting for. I should be able to share that with my friends and not be automatically sharing it with coworkers.  It’s simple and true, right?

Anyway, they don’t make it easy to have separate accounts yet, even though it’s absolutely necessary. Twitter wants a separate email account for every Twitter identity. With the recent rash of hacked email accounts, I groaned at the idea of setting up fake ones that are linked to my very honest and real Twitter identities. Happily, I found the article, One Email for Multiple Twitter Accounts! So now I don’t have to worry about people hacking email accounts I never use.

The next problem is figuring out how to post from each account. I’m going to try out Twitterrific on my phone. It’s supposed to be able to handle that pretty well, and it’s free. The computer side does not seem to have a great solution. It irks me that I’ve wasted three hours setting this up today. I hope it ends up being worth it!

Update: Twitterific did not have the features I needed on my iPhone. I tried a few others and even bought one, and none met my needs, until I found TweetDeck–free! Woot! I’m trying to follow just one stream as @cathig, and reply and retweet to specific followers as @cathig_sci or @cathig_edu. I hope this will end up working for my followers. While I would prefer a solution that didn’t require any action on my followers’ parts, I think people are just going to have to unfollow and follow the ‘me’ with the stream tailored to their reason for following.

On the other hand, I find it interesting to think about games that could allow and encourage students to get to the higher levels of learning within the game.

http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2010/1/21/the-value-of-games-in-education-a-case-study.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

PS: What I mean by the “teachers are still necessary” comment: That is purely a response to some teachers’ reactions to educational technology where they say others are trying to make them obsolete. Terry’s article proves that false. I think most teachers get into education for the reward of seeing kids get to higher levels of learning, not memorizing facts like tax rates. The article shows that using well-designed games is one way to get to the fun and rewarding parts of teaching faster.

• Captains need a non-geeky way to update the site
• Captains need to post weekly newsletters
• Members need to receive those newsletters by email and be able to see them on the site
• A calendar should show upcoming races, meetings, practices, and other events
• Members need to be able to accept invitations to events and sign up for races
• Members need to get reminders about these events and be able to re-confirm their intent
• Members and Captains need to be able to post pictures and videos to celebrate races and to help with training
• Members and Captains need to post and respond to polls
• Forums would be useful and fun
• A separate, Captains-only forum would be nice
• The general public should be able to find enough information to decide whether they’d like to join the team (including what dragon boating is, what commitment is required of members, the team’s general dragon boating philosophy, and when and where practices are), but not have access to the forums or to team member information
• Members need to be able to pay dues and buy jerseys

Add onto that list my personal requirements of creating a usable/accessible/standards-based (these all boil down to the same design requirements) site and getting to learn something new, and I knew I wanted something like Joomla or Drupal. Trying to keep my options open, I searched the vastness of the Interwebs for ‘Joomla Drupal’, hoping to find comparisons of Joomla, Drupal, and various similar products. “Various similar products” appeared to be WordPress and…well…nothing. (Please note the use of “appeared to be”–I’m just stating the apparent conclusion of my limited search–this does not mean other products do not exist.) I made the assumption that we would need a lot more user management than WordPress is designed for (please feel free to comment).

One of the best comparisons I found in that search was Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? On my first pass through the comparison, Drupal seemed to be easier, and where its functionality was shown as limited, I thought we could live with that for this site. But then I read the comments, and looked at a couple other pages, and the comments about having a solid base on which to work (Drupal) being more important than having all the accessories you wanted without a completely solid base (Joomla) swayed my opinion. If at some point the site needed to grow into something the whole club could use instead of just our team, Drupal would be flexible enough to do that, but it looks like Joomla would limit that. I am motivated to learn to create accessories, but creating infrastructure is probably more than I should take on. So I chose to investigate Drupal.

From past experiences trying to learn Open Source software, I decided it would be best to start with a guide rather than just downloading the software. I checked Drupal’s site and nothing really stood out as a straight-forward way to install it and investigate if it was really the right choice. So back to the Interwebs to query ‘Drupal getting started.’ I found a series of video tutorials at Learn by the Drop. (I usually don’t care for video tutorials because I typically want to move faster than the video, but these are unusually great.) The first one was on how to install Drupal. I was impressed that the first step really was to download and unzip Drupal, but at the unzipping point, I ran into my first issue. The file format was not .zip. I Twittered about it:

The “oh you also need this software” chain begins earlier than usual this time. Downloading 7-zip to unzip installation files. #drupal

I had 7-zip two or three computers ago, but once Windows could competently compress and unzip files, I saw no need to bloat my list of applications with a duplicate function. I just haven’t needed to share large enough files to need any extra compression options from home. I’d say it took me about 15 minutes to figure this out and get onto the next step. I then realize I have an @ mention in Twitter and see that two people who don’t follow me have replied to my tweets with help, advice, and encouragement! How awesome! Always before when I’ve undertaken my geeky learning projects, it’s just me all alone at my computer trying to coax the Interwebs into spilling from its guts all the answers I need, with no encouragement except a warm cup of tea. Suddenly with Twitter, I can share what I’m doing and people who have been there before, no matter where they are in the world or what they are doing, can reply, in the moment, right when I need it, with up to 140 characters of encouragement. Learning isn’t a solo venture anymore. Wow.

A third Twitterer also saw my tweet and took it to the Drupal community:

A newbie [that's me /sadface, but true] on Windows complaining that *just to get started* they needed to install 7-zip to unpack the files.

The word ‘complained’ and the general tone doesn’t quite feel like an accurate paraphrase. I really didn’t mean it to be a complaint. My tweet was based on past experiences where I decided I wanted to make something, researched all the ways I could do it, picked one, installed it, found out I also needed this for it to run, but that made this happen and I needed to install that to fix it, but this was needed to fix that about that last thing and don’t forget that other thing, too. I’ve shared that experience with others and it seems to be fairly common. So please read my tweet knowing that I expected to have to download and install more software, and I was perhaps even mildly amused that it happened so early.

Regardless of feeling a bit misinterpreted, I am so impressed with what my little tweet did. It got me some feedback and encouragement, it gave developers some feedback. I really appreciate how all three of these people affected my learning today. Thank you @greg_harvey, @ericxb, and @Whatdoesitwant.

PS. As a user, I’d be perfectly happy with a note on the download page saying, “The download file is gzip format, which can be extracted on all operating systems. Windows users may need to download a file extraction tool.” Maybe provide a link to a support forum thread where this is already discussed. It *is* nice to only have one file to choose from. This is a vast improvement over previous experiences where it was difficult to determine if I was considered a developer or a user and which set of files that meant I should choose from.

The topic has interested me from the first time I heard about open source, and further mystified me when I found out Google was actually a thriving business. It made sense to me that Google made money on ads, but how did open source programmers shelter and feed their children? I understood that getting involved in the open source developer community was a great way for a novice to get practical experience in the programming community. But if the open source stuff was free, how did established programmers make livings? What was that novice going to grow into that would put food on the table? My question always comes back to that–as awesome as the intrinsic rewards of solving intellectual problems are, our food isn’t free, our electricity isn’t free, our shelter isn’t free. And those are just the basic survival needs. Our degrees aren’t free either. (I wanted to say education isn’t free, but honestly, if you are willing and capable of being your own teacher, you can learn anything online–you just can’t legally get a respectable degree for it without money.) These questions stymy my thoughts of making a living as a programmer (along with a host of other hurdles–like finishing learning how to do it) and make me feel a tinge of guilt every time I recommend OpenOffice to my sister or another casual home user who needs something better than WordPad, but definitely doesn’t need all of the features of MS Office.

These are the questions with which I listened to Free. For the first 12 chapters, I kept wanting to interrupt, “But how do their children eat?” Then I gave up my pathetic struggling effort to change his stalwart advance of examples and facts, and submitted to his chosen course for the next five chapters. Finally in the last few sentences of the coda, he said, “Free is not enough, it also has to be matched with paid…. Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.” I really wish he would have opened with that. My entire struggle was unnecessary. The meat of the book is the history of economics, how pricing differs between atoms and electrons, and loads of examples of how companies with free products put food on the table. I went into the book thinking he was going to illogically try to convince me that those companies could just offer free–that somehow they could put food on the table while never charging for anything. Now that I understand that he knows food will always need to be paid for, I think I need to listen to the whole book again.

Or perhaps there needs to be another book that focuses on how to offer free sustainably. What I got from this book is that it’s very likely that most companies will have to offer free in order to be sustainable in the current economy. The new economics is how to figure out what should be free and what you can charge for, and what the reasonable charge is. In some cases, it’s feature-driven. If you need the features the average user doesn’t even know exist (like me with MS Office), you pay. If you don’t need them (most home users), you go with the free version. In other cases, businesses make money off of people’s ignorance. And this is the model I don’t like, and which I don’t think is sustainable. People don’t stay ignorant. And when they find out they were made the fool when ignorant, they don’t exactly have warm feelings for that business. Some examples of the latter are made in Anderson’s book–airlines charging for checked bags being a notable example in my opinion. He gives them all the same weight, though. At least that’s how I perceived it. His focus, except in the appendix, was in proving that it was possible, and not on how to do it well. There is need for the former, but my interest is now in the latter.

And here my passion for the topic dies off as my stomach begins to growl and I must go put food on my table.

That aside, one of many podcasts I heard today is from way back in March: http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=204 (Technology Matters: Taking it Global with TIGed). One statement really resonated with me. One of the speakers quoted a student saying that the way they were learning was more powerful because he was “learning with the world instead of learning about the world.” That’s exactly how I’ve felt these past two weeks using Twitter. Instead of reading news and blogs about events after they’ve happened, I’m being invited to experience and discuss events as they are happening.

Today, an educator, Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed, tweeted an invite to a professional development workshop he was delivering (it’s on ustream). I got to listen while I worked, hearing what he was presenting and hearing the questions and reactions of the teachers he was working with. One main topic was “transparent learning.” That’s what I’m doing by making a blog–making my learning process transparent to everyone in the world who visits this page. That’s currently one person a day, and I think it’s me! My low readership has been slightly intentional. Listening to the workshop today challenged me to analyze why.

First, how have I kept it on the down-low? Well, I let a year go by without updating it. That made WordPress ignore it pretty well, I think. I never send out a notice that I’ve updated it. And I tend not to make it very searchable.

Why? At dinner tonight, my friend told me she started running again. She said she felt embarrassed that she was worn out after half a mile when before she could easily run six. Well, I used to be a great writer. Teachers used to say I should write reviews. Now I fumble with tired metaphors. I’m out of practice. My friend has to be out in public to practice her running, to get good at it again. I can quietly tap away here in virtual privacy.

Today I learned that by posting the name of a blog, my post will be found. So perhaps today I will have two readers.That’s another step in making my learning transparent.

I’m also taking another step, and that’s by removing the moderation on comments. Why was I moderating them? First, to avoid associating my name with something someone might post. For example, my Mobwars post was a big hit for people who wanted to advertise bots, cheats, and hacks for the game. I have no desire for my site to be a portal for that sort of information. While moderating them kept those posts from being published, it also kept one genuine comment from being posted during the time when I was ignoring the blog. I don’t want that to happen again. I hope not to ignore the blog again, too, but more importantly, I don’t want anyone to feel I’m censoring them because they are critical of my post (unless it’s just someone trolling, in which case I don’t take the bait). Not censoring comments makes the comments exist, and with my transparent learning, I have to figure out how to deal with them.

What do you think about handling comments? Is it possible to edit out links and publicly respond that I appreciate the interest in the topic, but I don’t feel comfortable advertising that kind of content? I’m curious how other people handle this.

Thanks again for reading!

Over a year ago, I set up my account and made a post “at work researching social networking sites”. Nothing happened. It wasn’t groundbreaking. No amazing explosion of insight and knowledge appeared before my very eyes  (what does ‘very eyes’ mean anyway?). So I said ‘whatever’ and moved on to other amazing things.

As unimpressed as I was, I kept hearing over and over, again and again, from people whom I respected and who inspired me with profound thoughts and actions, how amazing Twitter was. So finally after a year, I logged back in. And this time, I get it. Here’s why:
1. Mobility: Twitter works for me because I have access to it wherever I am. The first time I looked at Twitter, I didn’t have a mobile computing option. Now I have an iPhone. There are a couple free iPhone apps and several paid ones. I decided to go with ‘free’ since it was just an experiment at that time. The free app is still working fine for me. Based on reviews at the App Store, I picked TwitterFon. I would not check in with Twitter if it meant needing to go to yet one more page every time I got to a computer. With it on my phone, I fit Twittering into all the spare moments of my day–while I’m waiting for things to load on the computer even.

2. Following Inspiring Twitterers: Twitter works for me because I follow people who feed my inner geek. I keep going back because I want to know what new, cool thing they’re going to tell me about. How did I find them? Well, remember I said there were all those people who kept saying how great it was? I searched for them and subscribed to them. I searched the iTunes Store for topics I am interested in and subscribed to the podcasts. If I like a podcast, I go to its website and more often than not, the author has a twitter account posted there.

Those are the two important things for getting started. Then things happen.

The day after I got set up, someone Twittered a link to a chat to watch Microsoft’s E3 press release together. Without Twitter, I wouldn’t have known that was happening. I followed the link and there I was with 150 people around the world discussing Microsoft’s new stuff as it was being announced. It easily tripled the value of the press conference for me. Those chats have continued throughout the week for Nintendo, Sony, and Apple. I keep checking in to see if there’s something else to attend.

In addition to that, I’m subscribed to education experts who post interesting articles and I’m subscribed to people who post about local events that I’m interested in. I’m continually amazed by how much is going on in the world. I knew there was a ton going on before, but now I’m one Twitter away from people who are there. What’s going on is in my face right now. I don’t have to wait for someone else to consume, digest, and publish it. I now have opportunities to be a first-hand consumer. This is powerful stuff.

Teachers, it’s pretty simple to say this should be a great professional development tool for you. I want to push that a little farther and ask, “What about using it with students?” First, caution! These amazing and inspiring people are human beings. Tweets aren’t always profound and aren’t always G-rated. So while learning to deal with reality is a valuable skill, let’s avoid the lawsuits since they aren’t really necessary. You can set up a closed Twitter ring. Create accounts and check the box with the lock. That means that in order for anyone to follow the account, you will receive an email and have to approve it. So create accounts just for class and have the accounts follow each other, and no one else. Then what? Practice writing headlines. Find a topic in class that interests the students and let them tweet about it from home or class. Tweet with classes around the world.

Thanks again for reading!

Excellent Twitter resources here: http://mashable.com/category/twitter-lists/