I rarely talk to any researcher who doesn’t want to have an impact at the classroom level. Those same researchers express frustration at how the current system in academia restricts them from having that impact. But rare is a researcher who expresses the belief that they have the power to change the system, and it’s a cruel irony how intelligent scholars can spend a career discovering ways to improve educational systems other than the one they work in.

If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated.

the easy part of tweeting is publishing content; the difficult side is actually committing to active public engagement

The Grommets are a case of self-directed learning done collaboratively. Cognitive apprenticeship is now available for the taking because many experts are narrating their work, or are being captured by video while doing their work. This phenomenon will continue to pervade our society. We’ve all gone mobile now. We’re getting continuous feedback from our networks, as The Grommets and even the kids at HiW did. It’s not uncommon today for a 12 year old to have an international network. These can often act as learning networks. More and more people will be coming to your workplace with their own feedback systems already in place.

It can't be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one-when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own.

Hat tip: Zac Chase, http://twitter.com/#!/MrChase/status/134415331358806017

Hat tip: Will Richardson, http://willrichardson.com

a true paradigm shift tends to take at least twenty years to become the new normal, even after the evidence has become overwhelming.  Why twenty years?  That’s the amount of time, Kuhn concluded, for the existing generation of practicing scientists to retire or die off.

The current generation, in other words, never make the shift to the new paradigm; it’s only when the next generation takes over the field that the old paradigm—encoded in textbooks, maps, experiments and training materials–can be discarded.

"We do not want to hate," they say, "we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?"

Hat tip: Bradford Saron, http://twitter.com/bradfordgs/status/108277311119433728

People don’t like to be configured. They don’t like to be forcibly told how they should use a service. They don’t want to be told to behave like the designers intended them to be. Heavy-handed policies don’t make for good behavior; they make for pissed off users.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t design to encourage certain behaviors. Of course you should. The whole point of design is to help create an environment where people engage in the most fruitful and healthy way possible. But designing a system to encourage the growth of healthy social norms is fundamentally different than coming in and forcefully telling people how they must behave. No one likes being spanked, especially not a crowd of opinionated adults.

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

unless we find alternatives to Facebook for preteens, we will continue to have kids lying about their age, or their parents allowing them to lie, to join Facebook and other full-sized social networks

I don't understand how the people of Tunisia overthrew their government without me signing an e-petition or changing my Twitter avatar.

users of the microblogging service now post 200 million tweets a day, Twitter announced in a blog post Thursday. That's up from 65 million tweets a day a year ago.

Even in little 140-character bites, that's a lot of verbiage. Twitter offers some context on this: Assuming the average tweet is 25 words, that means that "every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book" -- or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel "War and Peace."

Do your students know how you, the teacher, write? Can they catch you somewhere in the middle of your own learning process, doubting, wondering, as a vulnerable human far from the know-all/authority in the subject ideal? #

Here’s what I wrote in response¹: #

I’ve discovered that more and more, I’m wondering in public. I’m wondering on Twitter, or via Evernote, or here on the blog, or in a half dozen other places, and it’s beautiful.  It’s messy and scary and contagious and weird – and it’s okay.

80% of mobile video is streamed through an Apple device

Before the advent of the Web, the average person lived in blissful ignorance of the ire of others, only catching whispers on the windblown grapevine of malcontent.

Now, you have the potential to invoke someone's wrath with every blog entry, Facebook update and tweet.

There is every reason to believe that in the end–the bitter end, alas—markets supporting the creation and exchange of information goods will not only continue but will emerge bigger and better than before.

But the larger the threat and the faster it presents itself, the greater the resistance of those who don’t necessarily want to be transformed.

. . .

What can be predicted is that those who rely for their profits on inefficiencies in the exchange of information between creators and their audiences (and collaborators) will fight the revolutionary and uncontrollable transformation of their industries with every cent of rent-seeking capital at their disposal.

What is also clear is that copyright, patent, and trademark laws, standing quietly on their own, are no longer able to maintain the balance of incentives and protections that have defined these industries for hundreds of years.

. . .

The tide has turned.  The question now is what the new trade routes will look like.  In the end, it should now be clear, fighting back this particular sea change is ultimately impossible.

You can, of course, fight an unpredictable tide by building sea walls, flood gates and breakwaters.  These cause minimal damage to the overall environment.

But these techniques don’t work when what you are facing are tidal waves that get bigger and more frequent with every new technological innovation.

It is now clear that the true enemy of traditional media, still unbloodied, is the Internet itself.  The remarkable ability of digital technology to reduce the transaction costs of information exchanges of all kinds has destroyed the business models, if not the businesses, on which content providers have operated successfully since at least the 18^th century.

. . .

Law is often the last refuge of an industry in transition. Rather than change, or change as quickly as innovation makes possible, industry incumbents sue, first to slow the pace of progress and then, ultimately, simply to survive.

The students, parents, teachers, board members, and community members that comprise our school community are integral members of my face-to-face PLN, and it is important to dedicate time to meaningful work with these educators and supporters. That being said, the school “community” is no longer limited by geographic boundaries. Establishing a virtual PLN allows a principal to extend beyond that which is known and familiar and explore new and alternative ideas and opportunities. Both are unique in their contributions to my learning, yet both are very valuable. My virtual PLN is quite diverse, containing educators from all over the world

the ASNE review starts off well, saying, “social media platforms continue to emerge as essential newsgathering tools [and] offer exciting opportunities for reporters to collect information and for news organizations to expand their reach.” It even notes, “enforcing draconian rules hampers creativity and discourages the spirit of openness that flourishes on social networks.” But then out comes the stick:

But allowing an uncontrolled free-for-all opens the floodgates to potential problems and leaves news organizations vulnerable for the comments of employees who tweet before they think.

There’s the typical media-industry bogeyman that lies behind most of these policies: the staffer who types things into Twitter without thinking, maybe even (gasp!) breaking news on the social network before his organization has a chance to craft a story. And what happens then? Chaos! The very foundations of the media industry crumbling, dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria. None of that actually happens, of course