Comments on: Beyond Fear and Trust

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:24:13 +0000

Chris and Miguel,
Thanks to both of you for your responses. It’s gratifying to get such positive feedback. I believe that discussion of these issues is crucial to the development of a new theoretical framework for school literacies.

And Chris, about the tool tip feature - I wasn’t aware of it since I don’t click on my own page links. The feature must be there because I use a a stat tracking service that provides information about which links are being followed .

By: Chris L

Chris L — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 16:27:36 +0000

Yes, for the most part it will be other K-12 educators and their students as long as educators is broadly defined to allow in other experts, book authors, astronauts, professional musicians, spoon bending magicians and everyone else who the official educator might want to let in. The point of the ecology (a term I’ve used for a long time in a way similar to George Siemens) is that the connections will be most valuable if they have anchors in the larger communities of practice.

I’m glad to hear there are some efforts to make this kind of thing possible. I’m also glad for people like yourself and Doug and all the other participants in this distributed conversation (and thankful I don’t teach K-12, honestly).

By: Miguel Guhlin

Miguel Guhlin — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 08:03:17 +0000

Doug, thanks for posting this. I was starting to think I was being completely ineffective as a blogging communicator . I support the idea of building specialized publishing tools, even as i agree that blogs may lose their point when separated from the ecology of the Internet. Yet, we can build our own network, apart from the “real” Internet, that reflects the distinctiveness of its education members.

This is what Chris refers to as the “federated internet of K-12 educators,” what I’ve referred to as an ecology (using George Siemens’ word if I understand it correctly). To answer Chris’ question, who would we let in, well…we’d only let educators and their students in.

Now…how do we go about constructing a federated network of K-12 educators focused on digital conversations, personal learning networks and blogging students?

Miguel Guhlin
http://www.mguhlin.net/blog

By: Chris L

Chris L — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 06:39:29 +0000

The fundamental issue here is that the concept of privacy and safety that schools rely on is solely becoming outmoded and replaced with a different reality (and ethos). I definitely agree that Internet safety needs to be taught. But locking schools away behind virtual walls not only makes the communities less valuable for learning but ignore the reality of what the students will be doing and how they will be participating as soon as they leave the classroom. So you are absolutely right: there are all kinds of issues and pitfalls to think about. It’s part and parcel with what makes the tools useful and, being a reflection of larger changes in how our society interacts with and through technology, they can’t be ignored.

That being said, I would love to see a federated internet of K-12 educators creating larger virtual communities between classrooms/schools. Blogs and wikis have their problems with process writing, but they also have their advantages. Paper journals have their problems too. If the blogs and wikis are walled in there’s really not a point to them. The question is: who can we safely allow into the necessarily protected space beyond “just” the students?

btw: that “outgoing link popularity” tool-tip is pretty darn cool

also btw: Just so you know, I don’t only read and respond to items that are linked to me I have a number of your posts saved in Bloglines. You never fail to stimulate interesting thinking… whatever you learned from me you have long since eclipsed, which is incredibly gratifying!