Lee LeFever, over at commoncraft, does us a great service--value added. He has created a series of very short, fast-paced, informative little videos that play in your browser. The videos he has produced in the commoncraft show explain in plain English, as he says, various Web 2.0 concepts: social bookmarking, RSS, wikis, and social networking. The best part? He freely shares his creations to help us all and welcomes our including them on our blogs. They all use a common presentation style that is fun and informative. Here's his movie, Social Bookmarking in Plain English. Check out the other great movies. Thanks Lee, for sharing!

Click To Play

If we, as educators, as professionals, are to protect some of what we value most in our country, the education of all children to participate as informed citizens in our democracy, we must move beyond the inferiority complex foisted upon us by politicians and media with private agenda and exert significant influence in the political process to protect our nation's public schools.

We must demand that politicians and media peel away this facade of failure and instead celebrate the successes of one of the few public institutions in this nation that is still functioning rather well all in all, working in ernest to meet the needs of America's citizens and immigrants with absurdly limited resources and no recognition of success.

Gutting the funding of our public schools is not our patriotic duty. Labeling the hard work of our teachers and students in our public schools as a "failure" is not our patriotic duty. Demanding our public schools spend vast resources of precious time and little money on a growing testing agenda used to diminish their hard work is not our patriotic duty. Forcing teachers to focus on students learning level level fact-only information for a standardized test instead of welcoming them into critical thought and the art of problem solving, participation, and contribution is not our patriotic duty.

If you want an interesting, even important read, may I suggest:

"The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools" (David C. Berliner, Bruce J. Biddle)

Educators are held fully accountable for that over which they may have no control whatsoever. I say to every educator in our country: It's past time to hold politicians accountable for that over which they have full control: setting and adequately funding education policy that genuinely fosters the well being of all of our public school children to maximize their learning. NCLB is not such a policy.

Schools reflect the communities they serve. Schools that have significant issues and deficiencies are reflecting communities, real people, real human beings that have real, substantive, and often complex needs that are going unmet. Simple castigation does not a complex need meet.

Difficult though it is, I am trying hard not to express specific political views related to parties, specific politicians, or candidates. I'm trying to speak to larger issues. And the great issue breaking my heart today is the growing gap between those that have and those who, despite their best efforts, are in serious need. The continuation of this trend threatens the fundamental health of our democracy.

I have known Wesley Fryer for about three of years. This young man is bright, articulate, and provides a substantive amount of quality content for educators to inform practice. I've asked him if he ever sleeps! He is prolific: podcasting, posting, and presenting continually.

Yesterday he has posted a "must-read" for all educators: A Contrary View of Education and NCLB. I rarely issue "Must-Read" alerts. But, in these days, this is one such alert. His post is thought-provoking and timely. Rather than adding anything to what he has said, I think it stands as is. I encourage you to click, read, think, act.

Math isn't about the numbers. Music isn't about notes. Literature isn't about letters. Is school really about grades?!

Research indicates that our minds crave novelty and motion--seeing the world in a different way: creatively connecting what was previously disconnected.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that everything is really about pattern recognition. And while our very physical survival depends on pattern recognition, our souls need it even more, and at higher levels, to thrive. And thrive we must! We love to discern patterns in our life experiences, connecting the unlikely to make more sense of the mundane, to find more meaningfulness, to discover that which resonates more deeply in our souls.

Additionally, I think that human nature wants to overlay a fresh, more satisfying emotional context to otherwise ordinary life experience--yes, even to the parts and pieces of distilled, disconnected, fact-based curriculum. Contextualize. Bend perspective. Reshape, perhaps break rules. Connect. Disconnect. Re-connect. Find the patterns. Build new meaningful, more elegant patterns. Discern relationships.

We call all of this beauty. Being more alive. Learning. Art. Joy. Life. It's all the same!

As I've said for many years, I believe deeply that we don't know what we like. We only like what we know. And the more we know, the more patterns we discover thus making our lives and our contributions richer and more satisfying in every way.

Interestingly, these three pictures, from different projects by different people, defy motion and break existing patterns in some very unexpected ways (adding a new dimension to the research findings?) and thereby arrest our attention and invite deeper pattern exploration! (Each photograph is a link to different pictures of the same.)

How do we, as educators, as moms and dads, arrest children's attention to welcome them more deeply into that irresistible world of learning, of contribution, of discerning and connecting new patterns to better make sense of the old?

We talk a lot in educational circles, and especially those of us who are technology enthusiasts, about global literacy, global competitiveness, global awareness, global warming, connect, connect, connect. It's a big world out there. Blah, blah, blah.

But in this video from TED, Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, highlights the irony that in a time when we have the capacity to know more about our world than ever in the history of human kind, we actually know less.

Americans are fed a steady diet of superficial because, according to Alisa, it's simply cheaper to do. I have long decried the sad state of journalism in our country. Listen to her short (about 4 minutes) talk from TED. Then go hug a Social Studies teacher. Then you and the Social Studies teacher subscribe to TED. Watching those presentations will enrich your life!

Click here to subscribe to TED. Click here to go to the TED website.

Creative expression as amusement? Creative expression as contribution? Creative expression as manipulation? Creative expression as effective communication strategy? Creative expression to make a point? Creative expression as sheer entertainment? Creative expression to provoke thinking and evaluation? Creative expression as distraction? Creative expression to nourish the soul? Creative expression as self-indulgent noise? Creative expression as an act of problem solving? Creative expression as art?

How do you use your creative expression?

As our culture barrels ahead with this new capacity for the masses to inexpensively create and distribute slick digital media content, how will we evaluate quality? (Or will we even bother?) In the last century we had editors who earned respect among their peers and in the public eye for their skillful execution of craft, for their dedication to excellence and quality. They took care of the difficult and demanding work of crafting artistic standard. Now that everyone can create and distribute, who will pay attention to quality, to a shared, valued sense of worth?

So much of our life is already bombarded with commercial interests and just plane noise. How are we going to collectively learn about artistic expression through our own new-found acts of creation--a capacity reserved for only a few "talented" people in the past.

Will YouTube continue to be flooded with noise and self-indulgent, low quality products that only amuse and distract us from our true potential for higher levels of significance? Or will we have a growing body of greater contribution because people of all ages are now able to enlighten the human condition through this amazing YouTube distribution system? (Don't misunderstand, I think we need some amusement in our lives.) Will adults, will educators, look in amazement at student-created digital media products that required little skill but look slick because of the technology affordances we as adults don't really even understand?

I guess the main point of this post is that we need to raise the bar on what we expect our students to contribute. Just because it looks amazing (and we haven't a clue how it was done) doesn't mean it actually is amazing. The package isn't the content. Perhaps one reason educators need to better understand the digital ecosystem is not to confuse the form with the substance.

And, by the way, what actually is creativity and creative expression anyway? Want to offer some ideas? Click comment. Comments are now open.

And with that, I offer this little video, which many of you probably have already clicked on before reading this entire post (smile)! We do love our packaging! This 30 second clip took just a couple of minutes to create using animoto: upload some pictures, select some music, click create--three easy steps. This would be a great way to share students learning in your schools! (I mean really, what child wouldn't want to attend this school?!) Yet, substance this is not.