Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms and his popular blog recently presented at the National Middle School Association conference in Denver. The session was packed with information and thought-provoking ideas, some of which I have captured here:

Our ability to form groups through the use of 2.0 tools signals great change for our society. We are experiencing “tectonic change akin to the invention of the printing press” in the way we are able to share information and mobilize groups in unprecedented ways. Read Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody. Shirky examines our ability to form groups of interest and purpose quickly and with greater agility.

Examples of how this change has affected different sectors of society:

Obama’s election campaign: Use of social networks, over 8,000 affinity groups within the Obama campaign. A 21st century model of campaigning.

Fundraising: A senator candidate had the idea of posting a request for $8.19 from people wanting to contribute to his campaign to raise $25,000 and ended up raising $90,000, with many people contributing increments of $8.19 in a matter of days.

Media: Christian Science Monitor has announced it will stop its printed version of publication. Articles in general are now blog posts that people comment and discuss.

Business models: New models are needed as well as new ways of conducting business. “Businesses are not about products. Businesses are about conversations about products” e.g: customer reviews of products on Amazon.

Transparency: IBM has open blogs and wikis

“The more they publish, the more they can mine that intelligence—sharing out their information to become smarter.” Wikinomics: The more you give, the more you get.

Education needs to change as well. Are we preparing our students not only for today, but for their future? “Kids are changing without us.” Barriers to technologies that kids use in their lives outside of school are not finding their way into the classroom for effective use and for the purposes of teaching them how to use them safely.

What are our students’ “digital footprint”? Is their classroom limited to the physical location of their school or does it reach beyond through the use of 2.0 technologies in order to open their own personal classroom to include people across the world?

View of Richardson’s “classroom”: People from around the world that follow and contribute to his blog, URL are represented by dots on a Google map. This is his classroom and his digital footprint.

Students need to find their own teachers and teachers need to facilitate that process and help them identify those teachers that come from a global community. We need to teach students how to validate and edit content. Content is constantly changing, so teaching kids how to be good editors and find the most current information is important. We need to incorporate mobile technology as a part of our curriculum. This should not be taught as a unit on information literacy, but integrated in how we teach—“This is how we do business.”

Examples of use in the classroom:

A blog from students in Manitoba, Canada discussing and sharing information from a village in Africa that is greatly affected by HIV.

A multimedia magazine, a newer approach using interactive media: FLYP media

Richardson’s students learning Scratch, a code language by a teacher identified through Richardson’s blog from Scotland who happens to be twelve years old. We should not let the walls of the classroom restrict our ability to find teachers for our students.

Secret Life of Bees: Richardson had his students write comments and questions on their blog related to this book that the author responded to, giving them first-hand interaction with the author.

Concluding remarks: Yeah, buts….

Richardson acknowledges that there are barriers of time, technology, school politics and more that keep teachers from using these types of tools of communication in the classroom. He challenges teachers to try these tools for their own personal use as a way of introducing themselves to what is possible as a starting point. “How will we add dots to our own [digital footprint] map?”