LightintheWoods

As I scanned twitter tonight, I watched as Guy Kawasaki aka. @guykawasaki, the man behind Alltop & Truemors, blew off a request for a website review.

Typical, right?

Who can blame the man, he probably gets spammed with these type of requests all the time. But, I followed this request by @ashvala, who turned out to be a 13 year old, grade 9 student from Bangalore. His site looks sharp and is well designed.

After reading Ashvala’s Bio, I decided to use twitter persuasion to convince Guy Kawasaki to give it a glance. Within a minute he did and tweeted back feedback to the young “techie who loves gadgets and enjoys reviewing them.”

In the end Ashvala received a little feedback & a pat on the back from one of the biggest names on the web. Happy ending to a short story.

This is another demonstration of the power of twitter to connect people. On twitter people become a little more equal. Kudos to Guy for stepping up.

I was inspired by this blog by Anne Collier, which was written in response to Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur. I am part way through this book and felt as though it was time for a brief rant. In his book, Andrew argues that all of the with the millions of people using the social web we are creating a plethora of poor content. Further, he persuades readers by claiming that mediocre pieces distract from the important research and creations that professional organizations create. While this is true to some degree, it doesn’t out whiegh the benefits we reap from this new age of media.

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.

Copyright law seems incredibly outdated. These days you can get movies, songs, books; pretty much any creative material for free via the web. Friends of mine download via BitTorrent, some choose to pay for songs through iTunes. Even the latest Harry Potter book was available on Scribd days after it’s release (Thanks to Will Richardson for pointing this out on his blog) I have never really been into downloading these type of media, it just seemed to complex and a little bit wrong. But it is getting increasingly easier and more frequent and my personal opinions are changing. Recently, I discovered online TV, it streams the TV shows I am interested in directly onto my computer. The quality is not the greatest, but it beats paying $70 for the latest season on Lost or Heroes, plus no commercials. As great as this is, I still have anixeity about it, am I stealing? Will these great shows stop being made if we all stop paying?

I justify it by paying my SaskTel Max service charges which entitle me to these shows for regular scheduled programming, but most often I can not be available for the regular scheduled programming. However, I do not subscribe to HBO, and they have the best shows and I admittedly have checked them out for free via the web. Should I go to jail? Who thinks this is stealing?

A friend of mine passed on this reasoning that he had heard from his priest. The priest, an avid downloader, said “If your neighbor was continually throwing whole, unwrapped chocolate bars over your fence would it be wrong to eat them? No. So why would it be wrong to take advantage of products sent to us through satellites and phone cords?” What a justification eh, and from a priest no less! If only it was that simple, the owners of this creative material are not simply throwing it over the fence, but others are grabbing it from them, like candy from a baby, and throwing it to us. It can be argued that creators of this material need to improve their avenues and methods or delivery to the public, but we, the public also need to demonstrate online morale by not taking advantage of these tools.

So the questions I leave you with are these. How do we develop this morale with our students when they see their friends and family downloading thousands of songs or the latest movie? How do we demonstrate proper use of technology without infringing on the ownership and hardwork of others?

All of this is making me feel a little…