http://www.edtechlive.com/audio/WillRichardson.mp3 or
http://www.edtechlive.com/audio/WillRichardson.ogg

This interview was intended to help someone new to educational
blogging to hear candid advice from Will Richardson, author of Blogs,
Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. However,
as you will see, it turned into much more, with Will strongly
expressing his feelings about the need for schools to change.

For more interviews, and for information on our educational technology
workshops (including those with Will Richardson), please visit
www.EdTechLive.com. Will is giving a two-day workshop in Philadelphia
in early February. To join in the discussion on School 2.0, please
visit www.School20.net.

Notes:

* You'll notice a change in the sound quality when Skype kept
crashing and we switched to my calling Will on a land line.
* Will, as a "frustrated journalist," started blogging in the
spring of 2001--at which time there were only 5 or 6 other educational
bloggers that he could find. In 2003/2004, something began to happen
when interest in what he was writing about really started to take off.
He was using blogging in almost all of the classes he was teaching at
the time. In the last two years, there has been an amazing spike in
the number of teachers and educators who are blogging about what is
happening in the classroom.
* The other educational bloggers he was reading and who were
reading his blog became his "personal professional development
community." This became "transformative" for him.
* When I asked him if blogging was as transformative for his
students as it had been for him, I expected a really positive answer.
However, as he was teaching 9-week classes, he doesn't think that was
long enough to see that take place on a general level, even though
there were some examples of students who really "got it." So I
followed up by asking if he has since seen examples of blogging in the
classroom transform students. He said that he is not sure there are a
lot of examples of student learning being transformed by blogging and
the read/write web tools. This was a surprise, but I think indicates
his belief that blogging isn't being widely used in classrooms, not
that it's not transformative. In fact, I was expecting that he would
mention his own classroom experience with his students and Sue Monk
Kidd and her book The Secret Life of Bees.
* Will feels that he has a pretty narrow definition of blogging:
in order to be a learning tool, there has to be some "intellectual
sweat"--reading, writing, commenting, and thinking. That's not
something he sees a lot of yet, especially in the K-12 level, although
he does see it a lot at the college level. It's much more difficult to
do on the K-12 level, and while it is is happening in some places,
it's not to the extent he would like to see.
* Will surprised me with his answer to the question of how to
start classroom blogging. I was hoping he would talk about simple
things teachers can do to get students to blog. Instead, however, Will
kept focusing on the teacher using blogging for their own professional
development, which starts by reading educational bloggers and then
becoming a part of whatever conversation you are interested in. It
reminded me of the maxim that has largely guided my participation in
my kids education: if you want your children to love reading, then
love reading yourself. Telling someone to have a passion for something
carries almost no weight; letting them see you passionate about
something provides them with a vision of what that actually means.
* Because of his focus on involving educators in the blogosphere
themselves, he starts by teaching about RSS readers.
* Will has recently really "whittled" down the number of sources
(blogs, news feeds) that he reads from approximately 120 to about 20,
looking for people who are really good filters of the more general
conversations, as he can't keep up with as many sources as he used to.
At the same time that he is trying to expand the scope of what he
reads to material outside of the educational community, to reach out
and give him more perspective. One way that he does this is to use RSS
feeds for searches--giving him the ability to track or follow ideas
rather than individuals.
* Will is not sure how many people actually read his blog, but his
best guess is between 5,000 - 10,000 people.
* New bloggers will often ask him, "What should I write about on
my blog?" His answer: If you are reading what other people are
writing, and if you are trying to take their ideas and see how they
apply to your own life, that's great fodder for your own blog. It
shouldn't be just a journal or a diary, he says--there's nothing wrong
with that, but it won't really leverage what can happen with a blog by
making connections with others and their ideas.
* He likes the idea that students should be "clickable." (As you
will hear, I could image alarm bells going of in every administrators
head with this idea...) If someone can click on something a student
has written, that person can become a potential teacher for the
student. If the student can't be found, then those teachers won't find
them. I asked Will how you do that without exposing the student to
danger. Many of our students already are clickable, he said, but it's
outside of their school experience (MySpace, etc.). However, he
acknowledges that it will require helping kids know how to do this in
safe ways. This may scare us, but it's the way the world is going, and
it's already happening for kids. And, he says, we can do this
safely--there are tens of thousands of kids doing this already in
classes. He says that we don't teach youth to drive by just telling
them how to drive and then giving them the keys when they are
sixteen--instead, we train them and sit next to them while they
actually drive.
* Even though schools and districts are blocking and filtering a
lot of the sites of the read/write web, he thinks that they know that
this is a short-term answer, and that most educators realize that they
will need to figure out how to use these technologies. Otherwise, he
thinks they know that they will left behind and obsoleted.
* Education is not inherently collaborative or social right now,
but the rest of their life will be so. Will's vision: the classroom
walls need to be mentally obliterated. We have to get beyond the
building--learning does not need to take place in a physical space.
* Our kids have to do work with real audiences and real purposes.
If we're just passing paper between students and teachers, we are
going to be left behind.
* We have a huge opportunity to make education a "community"
process. There is a lot of learning that we can do in our own
community that can be facilitated by these technologies. The One
Cleveland project, which allows everyone in the community to interact
with students--for example, where local doctors could answer student
questions while they are watching a surgery being performed. We don't
need to go around the world to do this.
* We have to re-envision our teacher preparation program. We can't
keep producing teachers that are being prepared with old paradigms--we
have to help them be continuous learners and much less
content-oriented.
* There is a lot that has to change, because there are going to be
many, many alternatives that are going to be cropping up for kids that
will allow them to opt-out of education as we know it. He doesn't
think he's the all-knowing expert on school reform, but as someone who
has had a pretty powerful experience with these tools, and who comes
at this conversation knowing that his own learning environment is
nothing like what he sees in classrooms. He's not sure how this is
going to trickle down into systemic changes, but is convinced that
schools will become irrelevant if they can't embrace them.
* We have no idea of what the future for our kids is going to look
like in even five years, so we have to teach them how to be ready for
anything: how to build their own learning communities, how to find
their own trusted sources of information, how to network their ideas,
and how to publish, become clickable, and be creative.
* On building "Engaged Schools" too much of what we are doing in
classrooms designed to strengthen their weaknesses, instead of running
with their talents. Teaching is changing, and it's going to take a
much different type of teacher to be successful in the classroom than
has been the case for the last eighty years.

--
Steve Hargadon
steve@...
916-899-1400 direct

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