23 Things & Avid Online Learners

Back in early January Keri-Lee Beasley, the ICT teacher, and I started an optional Web 2.0 professional development initiative for staff at our new little campus (400 students K1 through Grade 4)- copying the very successful and widespread 23 Things movement in libraries (see this background summary and all these Delicious bookmarks tagged "23things", if you've never heard of it).

Our pre-assessment was an online survey asking about our teachers' familiarity -- either Never heard of / Have heard of / Have used / or Use regularly -- with a wide range of "things" like social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, RSS, Twitter, photo sharing, screen capture tools, podcasts, avatars, Skype, Google Docs, etc. (as well as some software the school subscribes to -- like StudyWiz, Atomic Learning, United Streaming, etc.).

The results were quite revealing, especially as we had little knowledge of the existing digital literacy of our staff, this being the first year of a start-up school. (Note: the results for our counterparts at the other campus were similarly interesting.)


Our goal was to increase awareness of what's available online to improve teachers' personal/professional productivity and enhance their teaching. We could only tempt people to try new things -- hopefully stretching/scaffolding them to increase their ability to take more responsibility for their own Web n.0 learning. (It would be a bit ambitious to say we were aiming for the ISTE Educational Technology Standards for Teachers.)

I have never liked the digital native vs. digital immigrant distinction, as it privileges the accident of birth -- and I don't think age is the critical factor. Digital tourists vs. digital residents would be more appropriate. However, as a librarian I prefer a comparison with how people become an avid reader.

The "Magic Bullet" theory of reading says the right book at the right time can turn a non-reader into a lifelong reader. Sometimes all it takes is a strong recommendation or taste of a genre to become smitten.

Becoming an avid online learner is similar. For some people it happens quite easily, while others are still waiting for the "Magic Bullet" -- the right tool at the right time -- in order to understand the power of the experience. So, in selecting "things" (or Web 2.0 genres) for our Connecting East initiative and recommending examples to have a look at, Keri-Lee and I were hoping to expose our teachers to potential "Magic Bullets".

A recent article in Innovate identifies the progression of a 21st century online learner as first to link, then to lurk, and then to lunge. In deciding what we could -- and should -- cover in 10 assignments, Keri-Lee and I basically set out a similar path for our participants while offering four levels of differentiation: Novice / Apprentice / Practitioner / Expert

For example, we began with social bookmarking (i.e., linking), as 44% of our target audience had never heard of sites like Delicious and Diigo. Later we suggested blogs to read (i.e., lurking) and ways to collect their own personal learning online (i.e., lunging). Other assignments included more prosaic skills, like manipulating/creating images and using interactive whiteboards. See our Connecting East wiki for an overview. (NB: The links in red on the wiki sidebar also show what we didn't manage to fit in or get around to.)
E-mail was used to announce a new topic, introduced via a Connecting East blog posting, with task details described on a Connecting East wiki page -- plus weekly face-to-face time on "Fruity Fridays" where we were available before school in the joint library/ICT lab to answer questions, with breakfast fruit on offer as an incentive.

It's not over yet -- the last assignment goes out today -- a reflective exercise, of which this blog post is part. Participants then have until early June to complete all tasks to qualify for a prize draw of an iPod, wine, or books.

But has it been worthwhile? Yes, definitely -- at least for me and Keri-Lee. In fact, it's been a good example of meaningful work, which Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers defines by the qualities of autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. It's also been a case of collaborative fun -- for which my role model is Dan Ariely; I just read his book Predictably Irrational and I was struck by how many colleagues he regularly collaborates with in setting up his quirky experiments in behavioral economics. Keri-Lee and I put just as much time and thought into setting up the Connecting East experiences for our colleagues and analyzing the results -- and had (almost) as much fun as Ariely and his friends.

If our own learning has been the greatest reward so far, it's less certain how much others have gained. We have seen definite glimmers, but the uptake hasn't been as high as we, of course, would like.

Which reminds me of the advice:

Don't water rocks...

Be thankful for the teachers who did take us up on our offer and who have tried something new, whether it's starting to bookmark, to Twitter, or to play with Netvibes -- and put more energy into them. After all, it takes time for someone to turn into an avid reader/learner.







Networked teacher image via langwitches @ Flickr
Rock image via jasohill @ Flickr
Wine image via Joe Pitz @ Flickr
iPod image via Andrew* @ Flickr
Books image via librarybug @ Flickr
Butterfly bullet image via razZziel @ Flickr

Pulling it all together online -- LibGuides? Netvibes? Pageflakes?

Research resources -- shared and organized in easily configured widgets/modules on tabbed pages -- that's what libraries using Web 2.0 tools like LibGuides, Netvibes, and Pageflakes can offer their customers. It's one of the quickest ways to create a library portal or home page.

LibGuides is not free, but it looks like it could be worth buying.

Check out the LibGuides Community page where you can browse for academic, public, and school libraries and see how they have used the product.

For example, see the library guides created by:

• Elizabeth Abarbanel and Karen Phillips at the Brentwood School (USA);
  
• Buffy Hamilton at Creekview High School (USA);
  
• The Burlington County (public) Library (USA).
  

Buffy (alias The Unquiet Librarian) recently blogged about how much she loves LibGuides and she's someone who has been exploring the best means of providing students with research guides and pathfinders for some time now -- see her wiki: Research Pathfinders 2.0: Information Streams for Students.


Netvibes is the next best option -- and it's free. This is what I've been playing with for the past few weeks, inspired by these librarians:

• Shanghai Rego International School -- Primary Library -- by Fiona Collins
• Discovery College Library -- Dianne MacKenzie in Hong Kong
  
• My Bloomin' Web -- by Leanne Windsor at the Tokyo International School [URL updated 27/4/09]
  
• St. Dominic's International School Junior Library -- by Yvonne Barrett in Portugal
  
• Campus des Nations Primary Library -- by Kathy Epps at the International School of Geneva
  
• Campus des Nations PYP Programme of Inquiry --also by Kathy Epps at the International School of Geneva
  

The beauty of Netvibes is that anything I see on any of their pages, I can easily copy to my own by simply clicking "Share" on a particular widget. And everyone has both a private page and a public page, so you can play around with customizing widgets on your private page and then move them to the public sphere.

For example, I just copied over links to kids' magazines from Fiona, links on books and reading from Leanne, more book and reading links from Yvonne, links to audio book sites from Dianne, and dictionary websites from Kathy.

I like how Kathy has made a separate page for the PYP units of inquiry -- and I'll be doing that as well, but for now here's my initial effort:


Pageflakes is a similar tool that I have experimented with before, but then I recently read a blog posting which suggested Pageflakes might die (from lack of funding). So I immediately began exploring Netvibes and was thrilled to find so many good library examples out there to copy. But then just the other day there was an ominous blog posting about Netvibes! Well, I'm not giving up on Netvibes yet. But as a form of insurance I've also just requested a proper LibGuides demo (and formal quote). By the way, this is the official comment on costs:

The cost of an annual license depends on the size of your institution and the number of libraries involved. We try to customize the pricing for every client, to meet their specific needs (as well to fit within their budgets!). The annual license fee ranges from $899 to $2,999 ($549 for K-12 libraries). Most libraries would fall under the lower license range. Contact us with the info about your institution (FTE or # of card holders) and we'll give you an exact quote. Chances are, you'll be pleasantly surprised - LibGuides is a great deal, any way you look at it!

I haven't mentioned iGoogle personalized pages, though they're quite similar. You can also share widgets and tabs with other people, but they're designed more for personal homepages -- where someone is logged into their Google account. So if your students all have iGoogle pages, then you could publicize library-specific widgets for them to add to their homepages. And if you want to explore other options, see this list of "start page" tools via Delicious.

Speaking of library websites, there are two I've admired recently for their clean "Mac" look and layout, though only Leanne's was made on a Mac. The other was created using a free tool called Weebly.

p.s. Check out the screencasts/tutorials The Big House Library has made using Jing (a free screen capture/screencast tool) showing how to use their library catalog (Follett's Destiny). I plan to do the same (someday).

Improving the inquiry process

Photos from Flickr: istlibrary

Learning from peers is powerful -- in the classroom and in life. I often get my share early on a Saturday morning, thanks to Skype and Beth Gourley, my friend and fellow teacher-librarian. When our video cameras come into focus, the difference in our locations is obvious. Beth, up in Tianjin, China, at this time of year is wearing a thick bathrobe and huddled under a duvet, while I, down in Singapore, lounge in sleeveless nightwear, cooled by a ceiling fan.

This week's treasures from Beth included an article she wrote last year for KnowledgeQuest called "Inquiry -- The Road Less Travelled" (Vol. 37, No. 1, Sept/Oct 2008) and some related photos. Unfortunately, the article is not yet available online, but should be eventually (and you could always write Beth and ask her to send you a copy.... )

In the article she describes the International School of Tianjin (an IBO school) and how the teaching team there has worked on improving inquiry in the classrooms and library, starting with a group exploration of inquiry and information literacy models.

The result was a model adapted from three major sources: the spiral of making personal meaning and understanding from Barbara Stripling (2003), guiding questions from Jennifer Branch and Dianne Oberg (2005), and language from Kath Murdoch (2005). The secondary school version is shown above, and they have a similar one with simplified questions for the elementary school.

I especially love how teachers use the model as a framework for documenting the units of inquiry. Here is an example from one of their Kindergarten classes (click to enlarge):


When Kath Murdoch came and worked with their teachers last year, they did a reflective exercise on their implementation of inquiry. Here is a summary of the remarks collected (also taken from the article) (click to enlarge):


They go on to create the list to the left (sorry it's a wonky image).

Nothing radical there -- everyone struggling to improve their inquiry will recognize the items as common goals. Still it's good to be reminded of them.

Beth is also working on a wiki called Research Story, based on their inquiry model (which I trust she won't mind me sharing). Like all wikis, it's a work in progress. But I know it's made me want to go back and re-organize my own grade-level wikis around an inquiry model.

Inspiring Libraries

Libraries are a natural source of inspiration for the curious and creative.

Listening to Paul Holdengraber, the Director of the New York Public Library's Public Program Series, is an inspiration in itself. Here are my notes on an interview filmed with him in 2007.

His job is to "oxygenate" the New York Public Library -- to make the famous lions outside "roar" -- to create a library without walls.

We need to make people think it's sexy to think -- that there should be both information and inspiration. We have to free the books. To have a thought is to caress our brains. Thinking is exciting!

Inspiration comes mainly from arguments around the kitchen table. We need each other desperately as humans (e.g., you can't tickle yourself). A library is a space of conviviality -- which can help us get references in common. We all need something to talk about.

Curiosity is one of the most important things we can arm ourselves with in life -- if we're not curious at 20, we'll be boring at 50. We must inspire curiosity -- to be interested in the world -- to have interests -- something to replenish our minds.

The blog Design*Sponge has done a couple of videos showing how a librarian at the New York Public Library has inspired five different artists -- a glassblower, a letterpress printer, a maker of ceramic dishes, etc. -- with material from the library's collection, whether images in books or artifacts themselves -- maps, old postcards, prints, etc. See the videos on the NYPL webpage: Design by the Book.

Similarly, Jay Walker is a man who believes a library should have objects to inspire -- as well as books. There is a 7-minute TED video of him showing off some of the treasures in his amazing private library: Jay Walker: A library of human imagination -- including an Enigma machine, a flag that's been to the moon and back, and a real Sputnik satellite.

Wired did an article on his library not long ago -- Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library - with plenty of photos. Go check it out.

I'm going to end with a plug for the book I think should be in every library -- as a source of inspiration: Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways (2001), which has been described as "the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected. "

Fletcher, a famous British graphic designer, is now dead, but here's a YouTube video of him talking about his unusual book.



Flickr photo credits: lion: MacRonin47; library: jamesjk

Curiosity: a close cousin of creativity

photo: Maggie Appleton

Robert McKee, in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, presents curiosity as the intellectual need to answer questions and close patterns -- a universal desire which story plays to by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.

Olivia Judson, scientist and New York Times blogger, sees curiosity as the defining characteristic of the best scientists and as something that must be caught, not taught:

In schools, science is often taught as a body of knowledge — a set of facts and equations. But all that is just a consequence of scientific activity.

Science itself is something else, something both more profound and less tangible. It is an attitude, a stance towards measuring, evaluating and describing the world that is based on skepticism, investigation and evidence. The hallmark is curiosity; the aim, to see the world as it is. This is not an attitude restricted to scientists, but it is, I think, more common among them. And it is not something taught so much as acquired during a training in research or by keeping company with scientists.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist and author who died a couple of years ago, argues for this same centrality of curiosity for historians and journalists (who are really just current historians) -- exemplified by Herodotus. Kapuscinski kept company with him by carrying around a copy of Herodotus's History throughout his years as a foreign correspondent, and he describes the influence Herodotus had on him in his 2004 book, Travels with Herodotus (which I highly recommend as an introduction to either Kapuscinski or Herodotus).

Here are snippets from the book:

In Herodotus's days, the Greek word "history" meant something more like "investigation" or "inquiry".... [Herodotus] strove to find out, learn, and portray how history comes into being every day, how people create it, why its course oftens runs contrary to their efforts and expectations. [p. 257]

What set him in motion? Made him act? .... I think that it was simply curiosity about the world. The desire to be there, to see it at any cost, to experience it no matter what. It is actually a seldom encountered passion. [p. 258]

To be a conduit is their passion: therein lies their life mission. To walk, ride, find out -- and proclaim it at once to the world. There aren't many enthusiasts born. The average person is not especially curious about the world.... So when someone like Herodotus comes along -- a man possessed by a craving, a bug, a mania for knowledge, and endowed, furthermore, with intellect and powers of written expression -- it's not so surprising his rare existence should outlive him. [p. 267]

Seth Godin, the business/marketing guru, has a short video on the importance of being curious -- a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push the envelope. He also believes the curious are a minority and laments that the educational system does not (cannot?) promote it.

Can curiosity be described as having an agile mind? (like Cliff Stoll in his TED talk "18 Minutes with an Agile Mind")

Is curiosity the skill of being interested in the world? Randy Nelson, dean of Pixar University, in a short video on learning and working in the collaboration age (which is definitely worth watching), talks about Pixar looking for employees with four attributes: 1. Depth, 2. Breadth, 3. Communication, 4. Collaboration.

Number 2: "Breadth" relates to being a curious person, though Nelson defines it as the skill of being interested. He argues it's easy to find people who are interesting, but tough to find those who are more interested than interesting. These are the people you want to talk to, he says, not because they're clever, but because they amplify "me", they want to know what I know -- they lean in when I talk and ask me questions.

Pixar is one of the companies highlighted in the book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win -- by William C. Taylor & Polly LaBarre (2006).

Nelson is quoted there on the same subject:

"We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we're developing people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with life-long learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people." [p. 230]

Isn't that what we all want?

The game of predictions -- as it's New Year's Eve

I have always liked to play the game of making predictions on New Year's Eve. Everyone comes up with as many predictions as they like, in whatever category they choose -- whether personal (who'll get married, divorced, have a baby, etc.), work-related (change jobs, get acquired, expand, downsize, etc.), political, global, sports, cultural, etc. All are written down and put in a sealed envelope labeled "PREDICTIONS for 2009" -- and stored in a drawer, ready for the next New Year's Eve, when it is opened and the score is tallied -- how many right and by whom.

We never looked more than a year ahead, and you only ever got the honor of being right.

But I recently discovered a website which combines the challenge of long-range predictions with the option of making specific bets (i.e., predictions with potential rewards) -- from those clever people at the Long Now Foundation (Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, etc.).


Here is the first bet made, back in 2002 -- between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil (who has made a famous prediction with his Singularity -- interesting aside: his Wikipedia page is labeled as one of those currently in dispute).


What does the future hold? Here's a possible map -- from Ross Dawson at Trends in the Living Networks (where he also has links to his previous Trend Blends for 2007 and 2008):

And here's the World Future Society's top ten forecasts for 2009 and beyond:

1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.

2. Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible.

3. The car's days as king of the road will soon be over.

4. Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized.

5. There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world's legal systems will be networked.

6. The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will -- in the twenty-first century -- be what the space race was in the previous century.

7. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it's acquired.

8. Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.

9. The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow.

10. Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.

Numbers 4 and 7 support the need for developing flexible learners, able to continually renew themselves as experts. And Number 1 means we might be able to resolve those arguments over who said what when ("let's replay the tape from that morning....").

Must go make my own private predictions now...

Round Two: Creativity -- and Mathematics

Just found some notes on an essay of Lewis Hyde -- "Two Accidents: Reflection on Chance and Creativity" (1998).

"The agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for."

"Wandering is the trick, and giving up on 'loss' or 'gain', and then agility of mind."

Dumb luck = luck of chance
Smart luck = craft added to accident, i.e, "a kind of responsive intelligence invoked by whatever happens"

Louis Pasteur quote: "chance favors the prepared mind", i.e., a mind prepared for what it isn't prepared for...

Chogyam Trungpa quote: "magic is the total appreciation of chance"

creation (absolute newness) vs. revelation (accident as a tool of revelation)

Absolute newness = "in a civilization as complex and shifting as ours has become, a readiness to let the mind change as contingency demands may be one prerequisite of a happy life."

Also just read an essay on mathematics and creativity -- A Mathematician's Lament -- by Paul Lockhart -- a damning critique of the typical teaching of mathematics -- devoid of the recognition of its inherent creativity. I want every teacher who teaches mathematics to read this and justify their current practices to me (says the indignant librarian).

Everything he says rings true to me because I had a teacher like Paul Lockhart from 7th grade onwards in my little town in Maine. Thank god for Wally Hayes and Ralph (Danny) Small. They made mathematics come alive -- and made us exercise our mental creativity every day in the name of mathematics. It was pure theater at times -- how Mr. Small would enthuse over a new proof he'd thought up the night before. We believed him when he said he had the quadratic formula framed over his bedstead. We never doubted that he spent his evenings reading mathematics books, enhanced by a bowl of potato chips and a glass of milk.

He never used labels for what he showed us -- he just showed us his thinking and encouraged us to show him ours. I went off to college/university believing I'd never had calculus, because that word had never come up. So I ended up repeating almost a whole year, not really knowing where Mr. Small had left off. But I definitely recognized that what my college professor had to offer was lesser stuff -- it was all just "cookbook" mathematics, whereas I had been trained to do the real thing -- proofs and analysis and an underlying understanding all along, no matter whether I knew what the outside world called it or not.

In reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" -- and the luck of Bill Gates to have access to a computer in junior high in Washington state in 1967 or whenever it was -- I can't help but realize that I also was lucky. It was 1972 when I was a freshman in high school that I got to program for the first time. We had a time-share set-up with some computer in Portland and all of us had to write a computer program to solve the quadratic formula. That meant creating an oiled punched-out tape that got fed into the remote reader and loaded into memory. So at 15 I began my relationship with computers (okay, nowhere near the 10,000 deliberate practice hours of a Gates, but..). Maybe it isn't so surprising that in 1980 I ended up in Boston at a software development company, despite my major in Russian Civilization. (I always used to say, languages are languages -- whether natural or mechanical.)

Anyway, here's Paul Lockhart in full force on how math should be considered in the curriculum:

"The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such."

"A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanet than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas." [G.H. Hardy]

"Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary."

"Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity.... you deny them mathematics itself."

"Math is not about following directions, it's about making new directions."

"A piece of mathematics is like a poem, and we can ask if it satisfies our aesthetic criteria: Is this argument sound? Does it make sense? Is it simple and elegant? Does it get me closer to the heart of the matter?"

"Mathematics is the music of reason."

"The trouble is that math, like painting or poetry, is hard creative work. That makes it very difficult to teach. Mathematics is a slow, contemplative process. It takes time to produce a work of art, and it takes a skilled teacher to recognize one."

"Teaching is not about information. It's about having an honest intellectual relationshiop with your students."

"How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract that any abstract."

Image credit: gadl via flickr

Common Genius and Creativity

I've been reading and digesting several thinkers/texts/thoughts on creativity -- and the genius of the cultural commons.

(Image credit: lightbulbs by andydoro)

The individual genius is definitely a discredited idea these days.

Malcolm Gladwell addresses this issue in his May 2008 article, "In the Air: who says big ideas are rare?" -- where he uses the example of Nathan Myhrvold and his attempt to create a group capable of generating insights that might lead to scientific inventions and innovation. Gladwell asserts that "the genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight."

Gladwell's latest book, "Outliers: the story of success", similarly argues that those people who achieve extreme success owe a great deal to the fortuitous ecology of their lives. "They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy." And the success of late bloomers, like Cezanne, is highly contingent on the efforts of others surrounding and supporting them (he says in a New Yorker article on October 20, 2008, "Late Bloomers: why do we equate genius with precocity?").

"For Innovators, There is Brainpower in Numbers" ran a recent article in the New York Times, affirming that "truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don't always realize it." The article interestingly argues that brainstorming (or "idea showers" as some teachers I know prefer to call it -- eliminating that negative imagery), introduced in 1948, has been proved to be less effective than generally believed. Evidently, "individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert". Instead, "systematic inventive thinking" is better, where successful products are analyzed into separate components and considered for alternative uses. "The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem."

Clay Shirky, professor of new media at New York University and author of "Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations", argues the same thing, especially in regards to the internet and Web n.0. (See here and here for videos of him presenting the ideas of the book.) He refers to the two kinds of social capital -- bonding capital, best envisaged as the number of people willing to lend you a large sum of money without asking when you'll be paying it back, and bridging capital, the number of people to whom you would lend small amounts of money without much fuss. (In other words, bonding capital is more exclusive, bridging capital is more inclusive.)

Shirky asserts it's not how many people you know, it's how many different kinds of people -- that most good ideas come from people who are bridging "structural holes" in an institution -- because too much bonding capital in a group results in an echo-chamber of ideas. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability -- it's creativity as an import-export business.

Aside re school librarians: we are particularly well-suited to bring bridging capital (read: new ideas) to planning meetings, interacting as we do with all grade levels.

Gladwell, in an interview, also credits his own writing success with the breadth and diversity of his friendship base, when asked where he gets his ideas:

People tell me things. I have learned, I suppose, how to position myself to have access to serendipitous moments. I fill my life with people from diverse backgrounds. I have friends in academia, in business, in technology. Once you understand the importance of those contacts you can take steps to increase the likelihood of having them pay off. I never come up with things entirely by myself. It's always in combination with somebody. I exploit the entire resources of my friends very efficiently.

Charles Leadbeater, a UK consultant on innovation and creativity, came out with a book similar to Shirky's at roughly the same time -- We-Think: mass innovation, not mass production. Videos of him speaking about the book can be found here -- and there is a 3-minute animated illustration of the book on his homepage. (I must admit, I like his plain confession, This is Not a Blog.)

Leadbeater brings up Lewis Hyde, poet, essayist, and author of "The Gift", a book (first published in 1983) dedicated to exploring the gift economy, especially with regard to the arts, though also including the internet -- and the power of sharing and becoming aware of the gifts cycling throughout society. Hyde was recently the focus of a New York Times Magazine article -- "What is Art For?" -- in which he distinguishes his take on the artistic commons as more academic, abstract, and aesthetically nuanced compared with that of Lawrence Lessig, founder and guru of the (more legalistic) Creative Commons movement. (See Lessig's brilliant TED talk on How Creativity is being Strangled by the Law.)

Hyde's book explores the concept of the gift economy (contrasted to the market/commodity economy), roaming through anthropology, mythology, and poetry (Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, in particular) -- and likens it to our current understanding of ecology -- that every gift calls for a return gift in a large self-regulating earth system. He notes the traditional types of gifts -- separation gifts, threshold gifts or gifts of passage (birthdays, graduation, marriage, newcomers), and incorporation gifts (goodbye presents meant to give a piece of yourself to someone going away). Transformative gifts are less concrete, but no less important, and cover the situation of a young artist awakened to their life's labor by another's artistic gift to the world, with the paradox of the gift exchange -- that when a gift is used, it is not used up -- and how the only gratitude required is the act of passing the gift along. (I could go on and on -- read the book -- it's available from the National Library for those of you in Singapore.)

Speaking of gifts -- look at this mindmap someone (Austin Kleon) has put up on Flickr re Hyde's book:

It is obvious how this all relates to Web n.0. Here, for example, is a snippet about sharing from a blog posting by Mark Pesce, an Australian future-oriented consultant:

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.

Speaking of giving things away, Seth Godin, major marketing guru, is giving away his most recent book, "Tribes" -- as an audio book. (I listened to it while doing housework one Sunday -- a perfect way to enhance menial tasks.)

His little book is about leaders -- and how tribes (the small units we're going to find ourselves belonging to) need them -- for the 7 C's: challenge, creating a culture, curiosity, communication, charisma, connection, and commitment. He defines leadership as the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. That leaders give people stories they can tell about themselves -- and that you can't lead without imagination (read: creativity).

Interesting aside: there's a new social anthropology book out by Daniel Miller which argues that in London now every household is, in effect, a tribe.

Another free download (pass that gift on) to note: Little Brother -- a popular young adult novel by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame. Re the creativity of young people in evading Big Brother's attempt to control them and the internet.

Back to creativity: I must, of course, mention a few other TED talks on the subject: Sir Ken Robinson -- if people know any TED talk, it's usually this one: Do Schools Kill Creativity? See also Amy Tan -- and Tim Brown.

I'm going to end with Alison Gopnik, psychology/philosophy professor and child development expert and her musings on why fiction is so attractive to children (oops, humans) in the 2006 Edge "World Question Center".

The greatest success of cognitive science has been our account of the visual system. There's a world out there sending information to our eyes, and our brains are beautifully designed to recover the nature of that world from that information. I've always thought that science, and children's learning, worked the same way. Fundamental capacities for causal inference and learning let scientists, and children, get an accurate picture of the world around them - a theory. Cognition was the way we got the world into our minds.

But fiction doesn't fit that picture - its easy to see why we want the truth but why do we work so hard telling lies? I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability....

So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.

I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds....

In fact, I think now that the two abilities - finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds-are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don't just tell us what's true - they tell us what's possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don't think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

Looking back at (the technology behind) our conference

Our conference -- Hands on Literacy -- came off beautifully just over a month ago, with over 260 people attending, but it burned us committee members out so much that we have spent the rest of this term recovering.

In our de-brief we made many notes of things to improve on next time, the most important being: "start planning much earlier" -- like 18 months ahead of time. We really only started working on it in mid-August and it was held mid-November, so it was a miracle it all came off at all.

The use of technology to plan and present the conference was another area for improvement. Wiki and SurveyMonkey worked great for us, but not enough presenters took up the challenge to make their pages their own. Also need to go with online payment/registration, e.g., using something like EventBrite, next time. And in retrospect should have set up Google Group for the committee, rather than relying on just a Google Email account. Getting all committee members up to speed with chosen web 2.0 tools before crunch time is something else.

Several presenters have updated their wiki pages since the conference, including:

• Marj Kirkland, the keynote speaker who also did workshop presentations on whole school literacy plans and literature circles -- her slideshows and her handouts are up on her wiki page;
• Genet Erickson Adam and Nicole Kutschenreuter, who did a workshop on Literacy in the Mathematics Classroom. See their wiki page for PDFs as well as a link to a list of books they used available online via WorldCat;
• Jan Stipek, who did a workshop on Using Free Voluntary Reading in Support of Mother Tongue Literacy, put a PDF of his presentation up on his page.
  

But wish more did.