This is my first uploaded draft of this children’s story. This piece has seen much trial & error many edits to get to the stage it is at. I am still not totally satisfied with the final product but am posting it here regardless. It is my hope that some will view the story and decide to offer suggestions on my writing and the design. Together with your input I hope to make this story better and more refined.

A more detailed post on my reflections and procedure for preparing this story will follow. I have had a lot of fun creating this story from the photo’s of John Maschuk (whom I haven’t found an online link for yet, but will).

*NOTE: Please click through to the YouTube Page. The pesky You Tube image embeded on my video within the blog detracts from the graphics and covers my writing.*

Andrew Keen’s

In response to the cloud of gloom that Mr. Keen blows over the idea of online creation and participation, I offer these reasons of why I see web 2.0 tools to be an integral part of education as we continue to live our days on this planet. I believe that these tools provide both the teacher and student with new opportunities that rarely existed in schools as recently as 3 years ago. These web 2.0 tools open the vault that is active student directed participatory learning. Users are encouraged to participate, to produce for an audience, to collaborate with peers and experts in virtual spaces. Often like minded folk share highlights of successful pedagogies and practice. Teachers are using web 2.0 tools to empower and engage students in these new skills. It must be understood that in order to do this successfully they must be willing slowly adopt tools into their personal tool belt in a methodical and reflective process. It must be understood that these tools are not going to go away until a new media invention makes them irrelevant.

Good teachers will realize will promote these tools in classes because they provide another reason to reinforce fundamental life lessons of etiquette, morals, values and privacy. By having dialog about these concepts with regards to the tools, students are given opportunity to reflect upon and evaluate their real life morals and values. In our role as as the grand sage we strive to mold learners to practice self assessment to continually strive to produce quality examples of their learning.

In some ways, I agree with Mr. Keen, that their is much rubbish floating around this WWW. It is time we began to investigate how these tools can be used not only by our students but by society. In the past I mentioned that I don’t hold the crystal ball, but I don’t see social media evaporating soon. My complaint is that Mr. Keen does not offer suggestions to improve the social web. Nor does he aptly recognize the positive contributions of amateur participation to society in terms of learning, discovery and collaboration. As the world shrinks we need to adapt.  Let us talk about how we are going to do that.

I wanted others opinions on these books, so I sent a shout out via Twitter.

Here was some of the feedback from two edubloggers that I follow and who’s opinions I definitely respect.

That is not where this sharing ended. While searching for more info on both books I came across Lawerence Lessig’s critique of Andrew Keen’s, Cult of the Amateur. I knew this would be of interest to Darren, so I tweeted the link to him.

I don’t know about any of you, but this type of collaborative interaction definitely builds my background and demonstrates the power of the online network. This book talk has taught me much more than any of the Oprah Book Clubs I have participated in and this all happened within the last two hours.