Open Web Publishing  Webcast with Clarence Fisher
for the Open Publishing Session of EVO2007
Recorded January 20, 2007
Download mp3

Transcript of Presentation

Clarence Fisher: Good morning from Northern Canada. It is 6:36 in the morning here. Coffee is done. It is a beautiful winter morning, it is about minus 25 Celsius here today, which actually isn't too bad, considering we have been living with about minus 40 for the last week-and-a-half. It looks to be a beautiful winter day. My kids are interested in going skiing today, and it looks like we are finally here, so good morning one and all.

Audience members: Good morning.

Clarence: I'm just beginning with just a quick introduction, since we are running late. My name is Clarence Fisher. I teach in the small little community of Snow Lake, which is the Central Canadian province of Manitoba, where, if you know your U.S. geography -- which more people do often than their Canadian geography -- we are right north of North Dakota and Minnesota, in a small little community of about 800 people. We are about 600 miles straight north of the Canada/U.S. border. So we are really in the middle of no place. For me to get to my nearest community, even, is about two hours. So we have a small little kindergarten-to-Grade-12 school of about 170 people, kindergarten to Grade 12. There are about 13 teachers on staff, and we are two hours from any other community. So we are really in the middle of no place.

Woman: [ unintelligible because of garbled audio]

Clarence: It is, but in many ways I think that's what makes our school, and my classroom, such a good example of the kind of things that we are. Because we are so small, because we are in the middle of no place, a lot of people really would consider us isolated and remote, but we really don't consider ourselves to be that. We think that we are evidence of the kind of things that are possible because of all of this.

For example, last year--I teach a split grade seven and eight class--and last year one of the girls -- one of the final exam questions -- was about how do blogging, and Wikis, and podcasting, and videocasting, how does that change things? How does that change what it means, the media? Her answer really was that you don't have to be a rich old guy in New York anymore to have a TV show, or to be able to get your voice out to the world, and that was what her example was, that even though we're in the middle of no place, we are a perfect example of that. So in a lot of ways, that is who we are, and I think that we are an example of... I love the title for this session: "Open and Participatory Environments." I think that we are a perfect example of that in a lot of ways, because I think there is a huge difference between having walled gardens and having open participation, and in a lot of ways, us being open to the world, and my kids having really complete control of a lot of the things that they produce and make, has led us on a lot of journeys that we would not have had otherwise, without that.

Woman: [unintelligible]

Clarence: Yeah, that is definitely the way it is. Maybe what we will do here is, I have made myself some notes, so maybe I will just ramble on for a little while here about some of this stuff, and then we can talk a little bit afterwards. Is that all right with everybody?

Woman: Perfect.

Clarence: OK. A few of the notes that I have talking about open and participatory environments, really one of the biggest things, I think, is that having an open environment in your classroom, allowing your kids a lot of freedom to form their own learning networks and form networks with people that they will learn with, in a lot of ways almost, I think it is in many ways a political action. It is opening up your classroom to the world. It is opening up your kids to diverse opinions, opening up the debates that happen in your classrooms to the voices around the world. And in some ways I think that is almost a political statement, because rather than closing things off and closing down discussions, closing networks and only allowing certain people in, when you are opening things up, you are opening yourself up to the world, and sometimes you never know what you will get.

A lot of people are worried about that, often, but in the year-and-a-half or two years that we have been at this, we have had very few problems, and we have reaped great benefits from all of the open discussion that we have had. I would like to bring people around, if you haven't read a lot of the work of Henry Jenkins, who is a professor at MIT. He actually talks about some of the skills that people need to participate in these kinds of environments. Some of it, for example, he talks about play being important. He talks about distributed cognition, so the idea that, really of the outboard brain, that we store our knowledge in a lot of other people, and we know where to go for information. He talks about collective intelligence, how all our heads together, of course, are better than our own head by itself.

Henry Jenkins also talks about networking, about the power of networks, and when we form those networks how it lets us do a lot of things that wouldn't have been possible. Another one that is big for me, and a final one, is he talks about something that is called trans-media negotiation. What trans-media negotiation is, is really the idea that if you are working in forms like this, you need to be literate in many different forms. You need to be able to work back and forth between text, between still pictures, between video, be able to work with Wikis, with blogs. You have got to be comfortable in a lot of different symbol systems.

I see somebody in this chat room talks about George Siemens' connectivism, and that is actually exactly right. I am actually speaking with George Siemens next weekend, down at the University of Manitoba, and his philosophy of a lot of this has informed a lot of what I do, that I think really, as a teacher, one of the greatest things that I like to say is that as a teacher really we are a network administrator these days, that one of our main jobs is to help our kids form other networks of other learners. One of our main jobs is to help our kids value those networks, evaluate those networks.

We form flexible learning networks all around the globe. We have about nine or ten other classes around the globe that we work with regularly, and often the kids and I will sit down and conference, and talk about this, about who is in their network, who is in their Bloglines account, who are they subscribing to? What kind of value are they getting out of that, how is that helping them? Does their network need a change? If we are moving on to maybe environmental issues, do they need to find some environmental blogs maybe, to read, something to subscribe to, some podcast to listen to. We often do things with Technorati, for example, where the kids will find things up on Technorati where they need to make watchlists for themselves, where they will keep an eye on other things.

So George Siemens has been a great informer for me of things like this.

Another one is Stephen Downs, who is a Canadian. I'm sure many of you are familiar with his work. Stephen Downs has done a lot of things this year, talking about the difference between networks and groups. It has helped me understand a lot of this much better. If you are looking for an open environment, well, a group is really much more closed. A group is kind of circular. Maybe the people in it are similar, exclusive. To be a member of a group really often means it's a closing off of other people that you might not find otherwise. Whereas when you are talking about networks, networks are much more open. Networks allow a lot of people to join. Networks can be strengthened. Networks can be evaluated, where groups really can't.

When you are dealing with a network--my kids, for example, all have Bloglines accounts, where basically as long as stuff is appropriate for school, they are allowed to subscribe to blogs that they want, to the RSS feeds for those blogs. I definitely require them to subscribe to specific things, things like Global Voices Online. We are right now getting a project started with a class in Colombia, a class in Kuala Lumpur, and a class in Virginia, in the U.S., and I have required them to find kids in those classes and subscribe to their RSS feeds. I have required the kids to subscribe to the news feeds out of Malaysia and Colombia, so they get a sense of what it is like living in those countries. It has been a fabulous thing. We have a Wiki set up where these kids from these foreign nations are coming together and starting to put their questions in that they have.

And to me, that's the value of a network, that is the value of being open, that is the value of letting people participate in environments like this; and you find a lot of things that you may not have found otherwise. So between George Siemens and connectivism, between Henry Jenkins and his talk of the kind of skills that you need to participate in these new environments, when you look at the work of Stephen Downs on networks, it really changes what your role is as a teacher. It really makes us look at how we can connect our kids in new ways that are very different from what was possible before we had these technologies; and in a lot of ways you end up with results that there is no way you could have expected otherwise, that if you have closed off your environment, if you have walled gardens where you don't let people in, then often your results can be very stilted, and over time your results will fade out.

But when you are open, when you let your kids participate in a lot of things and gain their own and form their own networks, you end up with results that you never would have expected, and instead of fading over time, instead it strengthens over time, and you end up with results that there is no way that you could have been expecting.

One other thing that I want to talk about before I open it up a little bit is the idea of literacies, and having open environments, having environments where you let people participate from around the globe, really changes what it means to be literate in our society. We used to mainly talk about literacy being the idea of looking at a text, comprehending that text, and maybe interacting in some way. OK?

Instead, what it means to be literate these days starts with the idea of access to information, when we need to provide places where our kids can access stuff in multiple forms. That may be words, it may be regular texts. It may be graphics, art class as a Flickr account where we post stuff up. It may be audio, it may be podcasts. It may be video that you have posted, or that you have gained from somewhere. So being literate in these ways is very different from what it used to mean to be literate. So the kids, first of all, need the skills to access information in a lot of different ways.

Second to that is the evaluation of that information. Just because something is online does not by any stretch mean it is true, and kids have to have the skills to look at a web page, to look at a picture, to listen to a podcast, and put on a critical hat. They have to be able to do that. I like to give my kids URLs pretty regularly, and just ask them to go to them, and ask them to evaluate that information, ask them to look at it with a critical eye and question, "Is that possibly true? How can we find out if that's true?"

We just finished, for example, a unit not that long ago on environmental issues in my classroom. One of the first things I did when we started talking about global warming is -- I am lucky enough to have a multimedia projector in my classroom -- so I found six different articles online about global warming. And what I did is I found three of those, three sites on global warming that said, "Global warming is a bad thing. Here is all the damage it is going to cause. Here are the changes it is going to bring to our countries." Then I went and also found three sites that said, "Well, global warming is a good thing, because it is going to change our climates, and northern places will be warmer. It will give us longer growing seasons. It will allow us to develop new technologies in many ways." Then I asked the kids, "Who's right?" And that is how we started the unit, was with ideas like that.

Alan November keeps a list of sites on his web site -- I think his site is just NovemberLearning.com -- he keeps a list of sites there that you can use with your own class to ask kids about if it is true or if it is not. There are sites like where there are fake agricultural reports from California, where it says the velcro crop is failing, because velcro is an artificially genetically engineered crop where hooks grow in one field and eyes grow in the other, but because there is a drought the velcro crop is failing. And I ask kids, "Well, can this possibly be true? How do we work with that?" So the evaluation of resources is something completely different that we have not had before.

Next, of course, comes comprehension. Just because we can access it, just because we can tell if it is true, can we comprehend it, so obviously basic reading and writing skills are still extremely important and important at a much higher level than they ever have been in the past. Because if our kids are interacting with kids from around the world, they need a whole other set of skills that they didn't have in the past, that they didn't need in the past. If they were just turning something into our inbox, in our classroom, the only one that read it was us. We were their audience. But now they might have a global audience. Last year the blogs of the kids in my class were featured on MSN's home page. We had over 4,500 hits to our blogs in about 56 hours. We had 4,500 hits to our classroom blogs. When the kids came in Monday morning they were absolutely blown away. They had comments from Lebanon, from South Africa, from Syria, from Indonesia, from all over Europe, Canada and the U.S.

It was an amazing experience for them and it really made them understand the power of their voice. Kids can have a voice these days, anybody can have a voice these days, and that is something very different again. That is something we need to consider, along with networks and groups in our classrooms, something else that we need to consider is audience versus community.

Our kids can have an audience; they can have a global audience but is that always what we want, because if they could have an audience, sometimes what that leads to sensationalism. The kids want to write a Hollywood movie. Once they realize they can capture an audience, then sometimes, they want that audience a little too much. That is something we need to be aware of, the difference between audience and community.

Audience, I like to say to my kids, audiences drive by, they may stop in and leave a comment. They may come back occasionally to see how you are doing, but they are not always there for the good of you. They are not always there to help you learn. But a community is very important. A community of people sticks with you all year. They drive you forward in your thinking. A community helps you get ahead with your learning. A community is there with good times and bad times, but an audience is not always like that. An audience may stop in when your blogs are featured on MSN. We were also featured in a CNET article last year. Our blogs have been featured in the New York Times. So we have a chance for a big audience, but I always tell the kids, an audience is nice. It is nice to get a pat on the back. It is nice for people to acknowledge your work. But they are not always here to drive you forward in your learning. And that is something that kids need to get used to.

What kids need to do, they need to build up a community of learners. They need to build up a bunch of trusted nodes that they can go back to. To our Blogline accounts, where my kids have formed a network of learners through things like making Technorati watchlists, where the kids can keep an eye on how other communities are developing through our Flickr accounts, where the kids can post pictures and get comments back. Through the Wikis that we have developed, that is where they develop a community of learners. That is where we develop a node, where the kids develop nodes of learners that they want to work with.

And one of the most important things that I always tell people about this, is that my classroom pays for nothing. We do not pay for accounts anywhere. Not because we are anyone special by any stretch. We have just found tools that we can use that don't cost us anything. Our blogs are hosted by jamesfarmeredu.blogs out of Australia who runs a wonderful service. It doesn't cost you a penny to set a blog with jamesfarmeredu.Blogs.

We host all of our Wikis at a place called PBwiki.com that stands for Peanut Butter Wiki. Again you can get a Wiki there, you can get all of the Wikis you want, and it doesn't cost you a penny. A Flickr account, you can set up a free Flickr account where your kids can post pictures on there. We host podcasts and videocasts at places like archive.org and at OurMedia. Again, it doesn't cost a penny. All you need to do is set up accounts at these places.

So if you bring all of these pieces together, it really changes your environment. It really changes what is possible for the kids in your classroom. Because once they realize they have a voice, as much and as valuable as anyone else in the world. They have a voice like the New York Times has a voice. They can post videos just like CNN can. They may not have the same audience, but they have the potential for having the same voice. That really changes things, to me that is the biggest change, that with technology like this people that live in small towns in Africa, small towns in northern Canada, we can get their perspective. We don't need to go through the mainstream media anymore. We can hear from real people, unfiltered, live.

Thing like Skype, it changes what is possible for us. It changes whose voices you hear and when you are dealing with a globalized world with international concerns, this is what it is all about. It is not about global competition, it not about preparing your kids to be globally competitive, it is about preparing your kids to be globally cooperative, and that is a massive difference. When kids understand how kids live in other parts of the world, when they can read the blogs of Lebanese kids and Israeli kids who lived through that horrendous conflict last summer, they begin to understand why it is important to understand the lives of other people around the world. They begin to understand why it is not about them anymore. They know that I am not their audience. They know that they have a chance to do stuff from kids around the world and that is a massive difference.

The last thing I want to close with is just three points. It is wonderful to bring all this in but there are three things that we need to drive home to our kids. The first thing is authenticity. If they are going to be online, they need a real voice. They need to develop that voice. They need to speak with a voice that is true and representative of who they are. We definitely talk about online safety in our classroom, but I also tell the kids, "Don't pretend to be something that you are not because no one respects that voice."

Second, we talk about ethics. They need to be acting ethically online. Again that comes back to representing yourself truthfully. It does not mean you need to give away information that would bring you open to things that are unsafe online, but you need to be ethical when you are dealing with an online environment. And you are dealing with real kids around the world, then you need to treat them ethically. And certainly privacy and online safety is an issue, but you can protect your identity, you can protect your safety and still be ethical and true online.

The very last thing is empathy. That having empathy online means being respectful of people around the world. Being respectful of those voices that are coming into your RSS account, that are coming into your Bloglines account, that are coming into the commenting spots on your blog. Understanding the lives of people around the world and having empathy for those voices of people around the world is something that is extremely important and that is something that is very different from our regular classrooms, because this is a skill that before this time, we didn't really have teach. We didn't have to teach kids to have empathy for maybe kids who have less than they do in another part of the world because they often didn't have contact with those kids. But now, where we are all connected very easily, very cheaply, and anytime that we want to be, this is an absolutely vital skill that kids need.

So to close, I love the title of this session, "Web Publishing in Open and Participatory Environments." I think it is something that can really change the way that we can look at our classrooms, that we can even look at what learning is because this can change what it means being an educated citizen in our societies.

So thank you for your time; thank you for being patient while we all get hooked up; and now I guess we are open for whatever is going to happen next.

Bea: Thank you very much, Clarence, this was a very inspiring talk. I would like to again thank you because I have been following your blogs for some time and I appreciate the way you write and the way you speak. Your students are very lucky to be with you.

Clarence: Thank you very much.

Patricia: I also wanted to thank you and I think it is very amazing how your kids are empowered. On how you empower them and I think that is the bottom line. You really have to empower people to find their voices, to connect with others, to understand the world because we are living in a global world and it is really empowering for them. You are making them into really great citizens in the future, so that is really, really great.

Clarence: Thank you very much.

Bea: Any questions, concerns? I think that Lane was worried about privacy and I think that this question came up many times because when I asked people to open accounts at 43 Things, 43 Places, and 43 People, some teachers expressed their worry and their distaste for talking about their own things or asking their students to post there.

Clarence: Maybe I can speak to that for a minute, I understand that completely, I understand that everyone is concerned about their privacy. Everyone is concerned about the kind of information that we give out. And that is especially true with kids. We absolutely need to teach our kids to be safe online. That is something that I have absolutely no compromise with the kids in my classrooms. I tell them never to give out things like email addresses, MSN addresses, their last names or really too much information about their families, anything like that. Online safety is absolutely perfect.

An interesting comment came up last week, written by a man named Clive Thompson. Clive Thompson keeps a weblog at a place called Collision Detection. It's the name of his weblog and it is fabulous and fascinating if you want to follow it. What he wrote about last week -- and what I wrote something about on Remote Access, picking it up from him -- was the idea that Google is no longer, in our society, just a search engine. Google is a reputation management system if you are active online, thru blogging, pod casting, keeping a web page, anything like that. Your voice, your name is coming up in Google. Your voice will come up in Google's search engine.

It is something I encourage you to do really, Google yourself and see what comes up. What Clive Thompson wrote about last week was the idea that when people are active online and since Google turns into the reputation management system, would you not rather write about yourself and you being able to write about yourself rather than have other people write about you and you having to read that? Because everything is archived online. And because things stay online, whatever people write about you -- whether that is your students, whether that is your sister that is blogging, and administrator that is blogging or something like that -- that stays online.

So I think for myself, as far as online privacy goes, I think we are going to find more and more that online privacy is something that we are going to struggle with. But if we can be active ourselves in these environments, if we can have our own blogs, keep our own podcast, maybe our own Flickr account. I would much rather have people see what I write about myself and I have a voice in that arena , than people simply read what others are writing about me. And to me, that is an important change and that is something as well that our kids are going to have to live with.

Google is the archive of our time. That stuff is going to be up there for 20 years and I would much rather that people find stuff that I have written, than simply what people have written about me, so that is how I think online privacy is changing.

Bea: Thank you, Clarence. I think something we have to live with is this issue of privacy. I went to the Internet Archive the other day, because I had lost some of my links and I wanted to retrieve them for papers I had written. And I found absolutely everything, even the first page I ever made, which disappeared a long time ago. It was an experiment, and it was there. So what I always tell my kids is, "Don't write anything that you would be embarrassed about or ashamed of 30 years later, because it's going to be there. So don't post any pictures of compromising situations; don't write things that you shouldn't." And I think this stops them.

Patricia: But, also, I think that you made a very good point, Clarence, when you said that we have to be very much involved in making sure that our students know how to behave online and how to protect their privacy. I think that the most important thing is to make sure that they know what to do, and that's our role. Our role is not in isolating them from the online world, but actually preparing them to behave and act to be there.

Clarence: I think you're absolutely right, Patricia, that I think schools with strong web filters are actually doing their kids a disservice, because, if we filter our content heavily at school and don't teach them to be responsible online, what happens when they go home and get on their own computer? Once they get home, they basically get to go where they want; research has shown that very few parents follow closely where their kids go online. So, if we do not guide them at school, who is teaching them the skills that they need to be safe online, to keep their privacy safe online, to keep their information safe? So I think schools that are heavily filtering the content are actually not doing kids a favor. In many ways, I think, they may be actually actively harming them.

Patricia: Yeah, I agree.

Susa: This is Susa in Denmark, speaking. I agree. We should certainly not make all these restrictions. I did some sort of source streaming of security. I had a look the other day, on all those Internet sites you can apply on Internet Explorer 7: it's extreme. You could try to protect from so many different threats, including seeing people naked from behind. What are they up to? What kind of thinking do people have who want to protect us from seeing the natural, naked body as such? It is so sick, because there are so many other things that I would rather protect people against if I had to make some sort of censoring.

And we do have these kids who have their profiles in the network services, such as MySpace. There's a Danish service that has had a lot of negative publicity lately because there was a really sad story: it was a teacher who had found a very interesting position as a youth-chat consultant. He said he was a psychologist, but I don't think he was. And, instead of protecting the young people, he was actually exploiting little girls and taking intimidating photos of some of them, which is, of course, disgusting. But, instead of trusting the children, we put some adults on the watch; and how can you know which of them you could trust?

You will have to deal with that. Young people do have a growing interest in sexuality, and they must have the possibility to experiment with their identities.

Clarence: I think you're right in a lot of ways. Does anyone else have any questions?

Bea: Any questions for Clarence?

Clarence: No.

Bea: OK. Apparently, people are... Thank you, Clarence.

Clarence: It seems that everybody has been kicked out. It seems that everyone has been kicked off of the SkypeCast.

Bea: Ay, ay, ay, ay. OK. I'm going to thank you for this wonderful talk, if there are no more questions. And I think that we have here - are you listening to me?

Clarence: I can hear you.

Bea: You can hear me. I can't hear anybody else.

Man: Hello. Hello, Bea. Hello, Clarence. I'd like to thank you, Clarence, especially for being so patient while we sorted out the technical difficulties. I'm sure your presence today will be appreciated by a lot more people in our group as well. We've recorded the session, which will be available for people to listen to, especially the people who couldn't be with us today. So thank you very much.

Clarence: I thank you for having me. And, yes, technical difficulties are often just part of what it means to do this, while we get this all sorted out. So thank you for having me. And, if anybody has any other questions or wants or needs anything from me, all you need to do is go to my weblog, which is just Remote Access. If you stick "Remote Access" into Google, I'm the first link that pops up. If you go there, you can get to my professional blog. All the links to all of my school stuff are there. So, in case people are interested in seeing our Wikis or our blogs, such as my students' blogs, it's all listed at Remote Access. And, of course, my email address is there as well. So, if anybody wants or needs anything, please, get in touch with me and I'll do what I can to help you out. So thank you for having me.

Bea: Thank you, Clarence. My students will get in touch with you. We start classes in February; so we'll be back.

Clarence: I wondered when you started that.

Bea: Yeah. Beginning in February. But it's the same class, following from last year; so it will be much easier.

Clarence: Well, that's good. All right.

Bea: Thank you.

Clarence: Thank you.