"Despite the constant reminders to the contrary, we tend to live our lives as if everything basically remains as it has always been."

On my morning walks, I've been listening to a course via my iPod, The Future of the Internet, coordinated by Ramesh Johari, from Stanford's iTunes University.

You can listen to the course lectures on iTunes at this link. You can visit the course web site at this link. I highly recommend it to every educator as a great place to get started building some understanding of what has become such an essential part of our professional and personal lifestyles--the internet! I was naive to assume it would always be as it is today! Below is the course description from the website:

The Internet today has evolved a long way from its humble beginnings as a federally funded research project. As a society, we find ourselves increasingly dependent on the Internet for our daily routine; and yet, the future of the Internet remains a matter of vigorous political, economic, and academic debate. This debate centers around ownership: who will own the infrastructure, and who will own the content that the network delivers? Unfortunately, most of this debate does not involve a substantive discussion of the “architecture” of the network, or the role that architectural design will play in shaping the ownership of the future global network.

This course provides a non-technical introduction to the architecture of the Internet, present and future. Students will be taken on a tour through the inner workings of the network, with a view toward how these details inform the current debate about “network neutrality” and the ownership of the future Internet.

I had no idea how ignorant I was (am) about what the internet actually is and how it came to be. I am even more perplexed by the policy issues swirling around where it should go from here. I very naively had some vacuous notion that the internet was so completely democratized: everything freely available to everyone and everyone freely sharing their voice in this global theater. Even more foolishly, I assumed the internet would always remain as it is only with faster access and transmission protocols and voluminously expanding content.

I guess when so much money is at stake, the stakes are very high, and the stake holders want more say over how the network is used, built out, and monetized. The article from Wired Magazine excerpted below turned on a yellow light for me. After reading the article below, listen to the course above to get some sense of how complex and important these issues are.

Feds OK Fee for Priority Web Traffic
Technology Video

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.
The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others.

The Justice Department said imposing a Net neutrality regulation could hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from upgrading or expanding their networks. It could also shift the "entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers," the agency said in its filing.

Such a result could diminish or delay network expansion and improvement, it added.

The agency said providing different levels of service is common, efficient and could satisfy consumers. As an example, it cited that the U.S. Postal Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.

"Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not regulatory intervention," the agency said in its filing. ...

Source of above excerpt: Wired News - AP News

Technorati Tags: fcc, internet, itunes, justicedepartment, netneutrality, stanford

Wes Fryer, over at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, commented on my earlier post, Be Informed As Change Is Afoot, and has written his reflections on Dr. Johari’s lectures posted for free on Stanford's iTunes U. He does a great job of summarizing the major points of the lectures and adds additional resources and reflections based in his own experiences as a former director of distance learning at a major university. I'd like to highlight a few things from his post:

I fervently hope we are not living in a finite golden age of Internet access and publication, when abundant peering connections between tier 1 carriers make it possible for literally thousands of people around the world to access content like my blog for essentially zero additional cost beyond their fees paid for local Internet access. After hearing most of Dr. Johari’s lectures, I’m less certain that the architecture of the Internet and the experiences we have come (most likely) to take for granted in 2007 for our “online experiences” will remain exactly the same moving forward.

I too came away from the lectures thinking that the internet that I rely on as a relatively inexpensive way to learn, create, publish, connect and communicate will not continue to remain as it is today. I naively assumed it to be a constant as we move forward. I want to again encourage educators, as significant stake holders in the future of the internet, in how it continues to build out and empower education, to listen to this well-reasoned lecture series to become better informed of the issues.

I loved Dr. Johari's statement that we should teach every high school student what the internet is. So the question for you to ponder as an educator: "What is the internet?" When challenged to answer the question, I felt that my description was nebulous and vacuous. The internet has become too critical a platform for educators to have so little understanding of it.

But then Wes really knocked me over when he extended the lectures as analogous to educational policy. Brilliant!

End to end design of the Internet has led to the current situation where the network is, by design, “content agnostic.” It strikes me that this design element is one of the characteristics of the web which makes it so inherently disruptive to authoritarian cultures, both in schools and in some countries. ...

This is, according to Dr. Johari, exactly what has made the internet perhaps the greatest catalyst for innovation in our lifetimes: the elegance of open, empowering simplicity--a design characteristic that immediately gave birth to a platform for innovation, one limited by our own imaginations.

As I heard Dr. Johari describe the futility and ridiculousness of someone trying to centrally manage and predict the path of individual packets under our current end-to-end designed Internet, I was struck by a similarity to the accountability movement in U.S schools. In the case of schools, technocratic politicians have ostensibly wanted to “improve schools” by centrally controlling the curriculum via the mandated assessments required for most students to advance on to the next grade and eventually graduate. Just as it is futile to predict the exact path of a TCP packet in the modern/current Internet with 100% accuracy, so too is it futile for a leader to guarantee “educational quality” through these top-down mandates for punitive testing. My own question in response to these ideas was, do we need a framework analogous to “end to end design” for schools which enables creativity and innovation, yet defies managed central control? My instinct says yes. ...

I’ll close with a final question Dr. Johari posed several times in his lectures which really struck a chord with me. “What is the opportunity cost of lost innovation?” This is a question that is relevant not only to discussions about network architectures, but also to education and education policy. What has been the opportunity cost of lost innovation we’ve suffered in the past decade as high-stakes, punitive testing has become the norm rather than an anomaly in our classrooms?

From my vantage point as an educator, with my initial training as a classical pianist and in music composition, this is indeed the critical flaw of NCLB: a federally-mandated programatic and funding emphasis on measuring and labeling basic, minimal achievement levels that stifles innovation and contribution by our brightest and most capable teachers and students. As we distill school down to knowledge-based (read "low level Blooms"), fact-only, recall-oriented, federally-mandated testing of a curriculum of minimum standards, what innovations, solutions, contributions, and high level attainment is lost to humanity as bright minds capable of brilliant contribution are stymied? While we can measure the attainment of minimum standards, we have no metrics to measure the vast impact of lost innovation.

We need a different educational policy, one that serves to create a platform for innovation, that empowers and rewards the highest levels of meaningful and significant contribution.

Source of Quotations: Moving at the Speed of Creativity: Understanding Internet architecture, a need for smarter networks, TCP and UDP differences

Technorati Tags: internet, NCLB, wesfryer, stanford

In our national quest for demanding minimum standards be attained by children, I want us to change our focus: NCLB should stand for No Computer Left Behind. You see, I am a bit worried that the technology industry is beginning to participate in the soft bigotry of lower expectations--for my computer.

I sense a growing trend toward a "device" (not a computer as we have traditionally grown to understand them) that contains less hard drive space (if any), fewer programs (if any), and a significantly simplified operating system. The brains of the machine, the storage capacity of the "device," the operating system per se is all dependent on the internet. The development of this operational model is well underway with cool online "applications" like ThinkFree, Google Documents, et.al.

Using these tools you can create documents in your web browser with tools that closely approximate the Microsoft Office suite. You can save the documents online in your free 1 gigabyte of storage space. Advantages abound: access your documents from any computer with access to the internet. Share your documents with anyone with a simple click or two. Allow others around the world to participate in the editing process--even live in a collaborative work session. Print your documents from any computer to the printer at hand.

Aside from the office-style products, there are online podcasting, screencasting, photosharing, photoediting, videosharing, videoediting, file conversion services (to name a few) as well. Shared "television viewing" services are even beginning to appear. Free and very inexpensive server space, like Amazon S3 and Box.net, for data storage is proliferating. But, gradually these free services seem to be moving to a more sustainable business model, which I alluded to in my last post. Could a business model develop that further excludes those who cannot pay "by the document" or "by the gigabyte" thereby deepening the digital divide between the haves and have nots?

If the rumor mill can be trusted, and one never knows!, at MacWorld this week Apple may introduce an internet-dependent "device." The rumor mill is calling it MacbookAir. Whether the rumor is true or not, my expectations for my computer's performance remain the same. I need the greatest possible storage (for digital media), the greatest possible processor speed (for digital media creation and distribution), and massive amounts of fast RAM. When I leave the house, I typically keep working on the road and still want as much computing power as I can get.

I don't want to give up any processing or computing power, any program functionality, or any system functionality to the creeping, crawling, unsecured world wide web. I don't want to dumb down my machine or open it to data-mining. I don't want to have to pay extra so as not to be bombarded with advertisements every time I brighten the screen or save a file to some great server in the sky. I want to minimize any dependancies to something located in the ether of "over the rainbow."

This week Apple announced their new Mac Pro with Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” 3.2GHz processors, 1600MHz dual independent frontside buses, 12MB of L2 cache per processor, up to 4 terrabytes of disk space and 32 gigabytes of 256-bit-wide, fully buffered RAM with Error Correction Code (ECC). Now ladies and gentlemen, that's a machine! I'd love to own one so I can run the world! OK, I'll settle for using it to make digital video more efficiently.

Perhaps a market exists for a small internet-dependent "device," especially if it can easily "plug in" to it's own "mother ship" at home as well. I must confess that indeed Apple struck gold with the iPod in a time when all of the nay-sayers were asking, "Who on earth would want to watch a movie on a 1.5 inch screen?!" Well, as it turns out, the answer is: millions of people the world over. And I'm among them.

An internet-dependent device would induce an interesting business model into the technology industry, potentially doing to itself what iTunes has done to the music industry: creating a metamorphosis in the current technology content and distribution models. But a significant difference would exist: the music you buy today, for the time being at least, lives on your machine, in your procession. With the new model, you might not own the music or the video or the computer program. You might pay for access to these collections of digital bits that live on the big servers in the sky. Your access is granted or denied. The long term implications are substantive, and the scope of possibilities are interesting to consider... Yes, interesting indeed. No one knows the impact a crawling baby will have in 30 years.

I just don't want us to sink to the lowest common denominator of "cheap" and "good enough" (not that Apple ever has, in my opinion) or lose affordable access to the real horsepower the digital era affords the common guy/gal on the street, like me! Leave no computing power behind!

What are your thoughts on these issues as this post only skims the surface?

Years ago I purchased NetNewsWire, an RSS feed aggregator designed for the Mac by NewsGator Technologies. (Their Windows RSS feed reader, FeedDemon, also seems to get high reviews, but, being a Mac head, I have never used it.) I actually tried several feed readers at the time I began feeding at the RSS trough, but of all the readers I tried, I fell in love with NetNewsWire.

In an extraordinary move, a few weeks ago NewsGator Technologies made all of their RSS feed readers, including NetNewsWire, free downloads for everyone--not your standard business model! (They do sell other software and services.) I highly recommend this cool tool. No, I highly recommend this essential tool.

Many people still don't know or have a really fuzzy understanding of what RSS feed aggregation is. And for those who do know, RSS is often used much too little. RSS is far too powerful to be so little used. If you do not subscribe to RSS feeds, you are really missing out.

What Is It?!
The easiest way to explain RSS feeds and their aggregation (fancy word for "collection in one place") is by example: If you had a child at Mabry Middle School, where every teacher blogs (even the counselors, media specialist, nurse, the PTSA, etc.), you could easily have to check 10 or more web sites (blogs) to keep up with what is going on in your child's school. On some days the teachers have posted, and sometimes they have not. The daily process of checking each blog quickly becomes a little tedious--even with the generous use of numerous bookmarks.

So, let's make this easy!

On the first day of school, use an RSS feed aggregator, like NetNewsWire, to subscribe one time to each teacher's blog. (You never need to go to those blogs again if you don't want to.) From that day on, every time you launch NetNewsWire, or any RSS feed aggregator you choose to use, NetNewsWire tells you how many new posts have been published by which teachers. All of the posts come to you in one place--in my case, NetNewsWire. When I launch the program, it looks at every blog or website to which I have subscribed and brings me the new posts.

In NetNewsWire I can read a summary of each new post. If I find it of interest, I can click on the summary and see the entire post. I can even click on the title of the post and open the blog from which it came.

If I have two children at Mabry, I can have two folders: one for the teachers of one child, and one for the other child. I can have a folder for news sites like CNN and the BBC, a folder for technology sites like Wired and Boing Boing. I can even have NetNewsWire search the internet for posts about specific topics and keywords with which I want to keep informed with the latest information. In this post I am only scratching the surface of the many powerful possibilities, but lest I overwhelm those who are first learning about RSS aggregation, I'll stop here.

As far as I am concerned, every student in middle school and up (at the least!) should use an RSS aggregator daily. This can be a powerful learning and research tool when used well.

Why Not Use Your Browser's RSS Capabilities?
For one thing, only the latest version of Internet Explorer has any RSS functionality built into it. Since a significant number of internet users use older versions of IE, this may explain why RSS subscription has not become standard practice. The old version of IE can't work with it at all.

And while both Safari (for Windows and Mac) and the new version of Internet Explorer have RSS functionality built into them, they lack some of the amazing additional functionality provided in the free RSS feed aggregators you can download from NewsGator Technologies.

How Do I Use It?
All you need to know is that blogs and even many websites create RSS feeds. One of the ways you can tell a site has an RSS feed available (not all do): they are typically identified with an icon that looks much like the one pictured next to this paragraph--small orange, "radaresque" icons. (I picked one that's a little fancier than usual.) You click on the feed icon which launches NetNewsWire or whatever aggregator you have installed on your machine. (The fancy feed icon pictured in this paragraph is linked to this blog's RSS feed!) You select the folder you want the posts from the feed to appear in within NetNewsWire. You have now subscribed. Now all of the new posts from that feed, that web site, that blog will automatically appear in NetNewsWire everytime you launch it.

Go ahead and try it. Download a free aggregator from NewsGator Technologies. Click on my feed icon near the bottom left sidebar or in the paragraph above, and watch what happens. This is a better, more efficient way to work!

Teach the parents of your students how to subscribe to your blog. Teach your students how to subscribe to your blog. (Don't even tell me you don't have one! I'll leap right through this screen and point my finger in front of your nose for your not using best practices!!)

If You Are A Geek (Like Me)
You will want to check out this post about tweaking NetNewsWire to provide you with abundant functionality. Also read this post. You can: have NetNewsWire feed you your blog stats, your mail, posts about you, comments made to your blog, podcasts, create smart folders, post an article to your del.icio.us account, post an article or a highlighted section from an article to your blog, show you blogs that aren't actively posting, show you blogs that are using the most bandwidth, send podcasts to iTunes to sync to your iPod, send your feeds to Safari on your iPhone (or other mobile devices, or any computer browser in the world), have your feed summaries appear in the sidebar of your blog, and on and on and ...

Educators, this should rock your world!

Articles on Wikipedia
RSS
Web feed
Aggregator
NewsGator Technologies

Articles about Blogs and RSS for Teachers and Parents at MabryOnline.org
Under the Hood of Our Website
How to Subscribe
Overview Information (which contains numerous resources about RSS)

Poll Everywhere is, as its name implies, allows users to create polls. But this is indeed a web-based application with several remarkable twists.

Many teachers are familiar with student response systems: you pose a question on the chalkboard or interactive whiteboard, and the students answer the question with the assessment device you distributed at the beginning of class. Well, with Poll Everywhere, you show your question. Students get out their own cell phones and send a text message. You get realtime results through the web page.

You can embed your poll in a webpage or blog. You can embed your poll live into a PowerPoint presentation. (Windows only at this time.) The application has a nice look and other features as well.

With the free account, you can have an unlimited number of polls with up to 30 votes cast per poll per day for up to 1,000 votes per month. Five other fee based plans are available. Clever ideas!

I tried Poll Everywhere today as part of a presentation. The biggest issue we faced was the adult participants not knowing how to send a text message. But it actually worked well!

An interesting article from Wired magazine underscores the need for schools to significantly rethink content delivery (read: digital content delivery), student-created digital knowledge products worthy of the global stage, and organizational and digital school structures that will foster, even promote and require, both. Here are just a few quotations, but the whole article is worth reading.

The advent of DSL and cable modems gave rise to a slew of popular web services, produced multibillion dollar companies and reshaped consumers' daily lives -- all with relatively wimpy "broadband" connections that top out at a mere 3 to 6 megabits per second (Mbps).

Now two of the largest ISPs in the United States are hoping to kick off yet another broadband renaissance, this time with home connections that promise to reach 50-100 Mbps, enabling a slew of high-definition content, better-quality video-sharing sites and even 3-D video. Call it Broadband 2.0.

Experts say this increased bandwidth -- when it becomes widely available -- will have a profound effect on everything from our social interactions on the web to the way we consume media.

"The YouTube philosophy is really the primary motivator here," says Connie Chang-Hasnain, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and expert in broadband communications. "Even grandmas post things on YouTube. But, right now, the resolution is terrible and there are some very predefined limits due to bandwidth."

All of that will change with 50 Mbps download speeds, she said, and by simply improving the sound and video quality of video streaming sites, you can dramatically change how a society learns, teaches and communicates.

[Source: Broadband 2.0 Poised to Reshape Web, TV ]

When I moved to California a few weeks ago I was astounded that Verizon, my ISP (Internet Service Provider) dropped a fiber cable right at my front door: FIOS. I can download and upload as fast as 15mps--stunning!

We are presently sitting on incredible, yet largely un-leveraged, potential for maximizing the art and science of teaching and learning, even without Broadband 2.

Apparently May 1st is also "official" RSS day. As I travel around speaking to educators and parents, I find that RSS is still a huge mystery to the great majority of people. I suspect RSS is one of the world's best kept secrets. So many people don't even know RSS exists. And of the people that do, many have some foggy notion about what it might be. I must admit, I had a bit of difficulty getting my head around the power of this technology myself.

Resources to Learn About RSS
So, in honor of RSS Day, here are some easy-to-get-your-head-around resources that really help clear up some of the fog of mystery.

Let's start with a short, easy Common Craft video about RSS. And Back in Skinny Jeans has a great post entitled, How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way, that's an easy and informative read. Wesley Fryer, over at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, wrote a post explaining RSS back in 2005. (And if you still want to see more videos on RSS, check out these search results for "RSS" video on YouTube and "what is rss" on TeacherTube.)

I've written about RSS a few times over the years. You can check out these posts as well if you like:
More on the Power of RSS and NetNewsWire (2/1//2008)
Cool Tool Alert: NetNewsWire (2/3/2008)
Under the Hood of Our New Website (6/2006)
How to Subscribe to MabryOnline.org through RSS (6/2006)

Saving the Best for Last
And three other sources for your RSS learning pleasure: these are actually RSS aggregators. Don't worry if you're not sure what that means. Just go to either type (online or download) or both of these, and start using their aggregator. As you use it, and each resource will guide you through how to do so, you will begin to understand more about RSS. After all, we really learn by doing!

Bloglines (setup your free online account)
NetNewWire (Mac free download) or FeedDemon (Windows free download)
Google Reader (setup your free online account)

I know you're busy. Your time is jammed full. But RSS is just too powerful to ignore! It's an efficiency tool. RSS can help you find what you're interested in much faster by having it automatically come to you! Start learning it today!

A Great New Twist
My blogging system allows me to create an RSS feed from a search request on my blog. So, in the search field at the left, I typed in "RSS." All of the posts I have published that contain "RSS" appear. In the sidebar on the search results page is Subscribe to feed. The search field created an RSS feed for the search results!

What does that mean? Well, you could subscribe to the search results. In other words, if you subscribed to the search result for "RSS," from now on, anytime I publish a post that includes "RSS" that post would go straight to your RSS aggregator. Nifty little thing that RSS feed!

In the past two weeks I came across two quick reads and two videos that caused me to make some connections worthy of thought.

Bruce Schneier, writing on May 15, 2008, at Wired, made me stop and think about all of the "free" services I routinely explore for their value-added potential in education. I often just make up absurd information when that information is required of me and I don't want to provide it (like, for an email address: noneof@yourbusiness.com). I have never stopped to think about the lifespan or later possible use of this meaningless, inaccurate information. I just don't want any more junk mail. Bruce writes:

Our data is a part of us. It's intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch.

[Source: Our Data, Ourselves ]

We teach children about the socially expected behaviors surrounding our personal physical space from casual to intimate. This article really got me to stop and think about the virtual me, my data (from financial, health, social, professional, civic...) and the socially and legally appropriate ways that information should be touched--information, accurate or not, that comes to represent me and affect decisions made about and for me, perhaps without my knowledge about the decisions ever being made. I might not even know the information was aggregated and used.

I also watched Jonathan Zittrain's presentation (from April 11, 2008, at the Tribeca Grand in NYC) about his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The video of the presentation (about an hour) is graciously made available by the New York Greater Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society at this link. In the presentation Jonathan talks about the generative nature of the internet versus a new push to use "tethered devices" as he calls them--devices that close innovation and are controlled by the manufacturer even after the sale. [I have written briefly about the internet as an operating system before. Jonathan's ideas helped me clarify some of my thinking.]

He mentions several really interesting examples before extending his examples to the FBI paying to have the OnStar system remotely reprogrammed in a car owned by people of interest to the FBI so that everything spoken in the car was transmitted to the FBI through OnStar without anyone in the car being aware. He goes on to say that because of consumer demand we have built an unrivaled infrastructure that could be leveraged for surveillance (by the good guys and the bad): cell phones and other devices.

And then I read this article about the National Cyber Security Initiative by Ryan Singel at Wired:

... would spend billions on unproven, embryonic technology, and possibly illegal or ill-advised projects, according to the analysis ...

While many of the specifics of the plan are classified, U.S. intelligence chief Michael McConnell told the New Yorker in January that he wants the National Security Agency to begin eavesdropping on the internet, and a McConnell aide said the spy agency was prepared to examine the content of e-mails, file transfers and Google searches without a warrant.

[Source: Report: Government's Cyber Security Plan Is Riddled With New Spying Programs]

I'm not really passing any judgement on these examples. Like most everyone else, I want the bad guys caught. I want us to prevent the bad people from doing bad things to good people. But larger issues may be at stake, issues worthy of careful thought and scrutiny. None of us want to wake up one morning and ask, "How in the world did we get here?!"

The rampant pace at which our technologies are developing is vastly outstripping our awareness of the issues that surround that development and our capacity to have informed conversations about those issues to establish public policy and legal frameworks that are both reasonable, fair, and that appropriately safeguard and balance the best interests of a free democratic society, a capitalist economy, and the rights of the individual. And not only is the pace of development rapid, can it also be completely invisible to public scrutiny and democratic oversight? Should it be? These are complex questions!

And during the week I also came across this video interview, on a less weighty, yet more immediately personal level, at Switched with Clay Shirky, adjunct professor teaching New Media in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Clay really informs my thinking about the internet.

The issues broadly touched on in this post are complex and have long term implications for freedom, safety, democracy, privacy, economic sustainability, to name but a few. In order to have more informed conversations with our children about these significant, developing concerns, we need to have greater public and professional conversation about data security, privacy, and ways we can move our social, political, and legal structures to develop policy frameworks that keep pace with the challenges that technology brings to our daily lives.

These are challenging and exciting times!

I came across one of Bruno Giussani's blogs, Lunch Over IP, a few years back and have enjoyed reading his thought-provoking posts ever since. He just posted The Value Chain 2.0: Bringing in the Consumer , an essay by Xavier Comtesse (mathematician, author, and Geneva-based Director of Avenir Suisse, a think-tank) and Jeffrey Huang (Professor and Director of the Media and Design Laboratory at the Swiss Institute of Technology EPFL in Lausanne).

I've been thinking a lot lately about the business/production models of successful companies like eBay, Flickr, et al in this knowledge based economy that swirls around the generative, participatory technologies that are beginning to thrive in the world wide web ecosystem. The value of their business models is based, in part, not in what their factories produce, as they have none, but in what their consumers voluntarily contribute and share. This is such an enormous thinking twist for the industrialized mindset of my generation's brain. And, frankly, as an educator trying to think outside the box, this makes my head hurt. But it still fascinates me.

In their essay, Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang state:

Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. [emphasis added] Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.

The ConsumActor acts along two dimensions, as a:
- creator of context (action)
- creator of content (knowledge)

The whole essay is a rich exercise in "thinking different," which, of course, I love. But, always the educator, I'm asking myself, "What are the implications here for best practices in education?" Leveraging student "consumers" in the production of value as creators of context and creators of content... This blows my mind as these ideas significantly extend my former questions: "Who owns the learning in your class? Who is doing all of the thinking work in your class?" Now, add, "Who is creating the value in your class? Who is 'actioning' knowledge creation?"

Though some educators seem to suggest this, I suspect it would be naive for us to assume that the students alone are capable of doing this. If they could, we wouldn't need schools as anything beyond a baby-sitting service. No, as Value Chain 2.0 indicates, this is a complex joint venture.

The hard part for our profession, is figuring the implementation out. What does this look like?

I'm with Scott McCloud, who issues a brilliant challenge in this post on the alarmist empty rhetoric of bystanders. (It's just way too easy to criticize the hard, often thankless work of our educators.) He basically asks, "What else you got?" If we could just get the finger waggers to join us in figuring out what implementing very complex and exciting ideas like those offered in Value Chain 2.0, that alone would be no less than a kind gesture and perhaps even a tremendous help. Criticism and fear are too cheap and easy.

Using today's tools, what does leveraging the participatory generative creative potential of your students look like in your school setting? How can students substantively participate in the creation of context (action) and content (knowledge) in our present techno-centric world? What can "school" learn from eBay, Flickr, Amazon and the like? We need these discussions in school.

The New York Times has an interesting article on iPod Touch and iPhones on university campuses this Fall session. You will have to get past the advertisement to see it at this link.

When new technologies challenge existing norms, we see interesting ideas and application emerge. Some compete against others. Some ideas flourish and evolve in transformative and empowering ways. Overall, I think we will see huge potential for learning develop in the emerging technologies surrounding iPod Touch and iPhone. We just have to get beyond the adolescent exploration and trial and error phase of the implementation cycle—the one we seem to still be in with the internet and Web 2.0.

I frequently quote Clay Shirky. His thinking is consistently deep, insightful, and thought-provoking! This video, filmed in July, 2005, was just posted at TED last month, July, 2008. I highly recommend educators follow his work.

Take about 20 minutes to watch this presentation on the norms of institutions being challenged by new collaborative infrastructures. "The printing press took us to 200 years of chaos. ... [With this new, emerging, digital, collaborative infrastructure] I'm predicting 50. ... Institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure. And the more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. ... The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific."

I have to listen to him at least a couple of times to get my head around the magnitude of what he is saying!

Photo credit: CC by eirikso @ flickr