Student insight from Horizon & another video you've got to see!

A student and I were having just this conversation on Friday. In this student's evaluation of Don Tapscott's keynote for horizon, Sarah H in her blog post "Modern Revolution" says:

"we control our screen instead of watching it as our parents did. Kids around the world use their voices through YouTube, blogs, and wikis. We work together to showcase our opinions on what is happening to the world.

Collaboration is not just a word in the dictionary that we have to recite to a chalkboard. It’s something that we have become accustomed to; it is as natural to us as breathing.

We collaborate daily with our peers, classmates, and sometimes even our teachers. Instead of looking at a list of instructions in a book, we figure things out by learning together.

In the digital age, we do not have to strike in front of the White House. We effect change by telling the world the truth from the comfort of our own homes using the Internet with facebook, myspace, blogger, and so much more."

Sarah's prophetic and insightful words (she's in 10th grade!) really resonate with me as I see one of the latest movies making the rounds. (hat tip Scott McLeod).



And as I reflect on this, I think of Kate Olson's comments on "the cocktail party theory" -- Kate says:

"Now, what inspired me to write this post was first noticing that everyone who wrote ABOUT Jon got more comments than he did, as well as his next post “The conversation is getting away from me…..” (more reflections)

I’m going to do the classy thing and close comments here - go show Jon some blogger love and tell HIM how you feel - he’s the one who started all of this………."

I think that again, Jon is going through the typical feeling of all of this. For example, Flat Classroom project has generated a lot of conversation. I do not control it, I do not try to track it all. I cannot!

The whole mentality of how this thing works is not the idea of someone bringing their favorite toy to school and then hording it in the corner during playtime saying, "Mine Mine!" These conversations are not owned by anyone.

Although O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 and Bernie Dodge (did you know he has a blog?) created Webquests -- they'll tell you that their own terms are often misused.

I think that books such as Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything have helped me truly understand the societal dynamics of all of these things.

I don't like the idea of ever closing a conversation on a blog post -- I still get comments on very old posts and it also makes me realize that sometimes I need to revisit a topic.

This is about a new place for conversation and we cannot be everywhere at once! It is about sharing conversation and ideas and if any of us don't like the idea that our things might be remixed or talked about somewhere else, then we need to rethink participation in the blogosphere, that is the way the whole thing works!

I'm planning to rewrite 10 habits of bloggers that win to help newcoming bloggers understand how to track these conversations (using backlinks), and how to know that they shouldn't move their blog and how authorities work, etc.

tag: edublogosphere, Kate Olson, Scott McLeod, Horizon project, Wikinomics, Don Tapscott