Five Recommended Readings?

Here is an essay I wrote for a 2008 book on educational technology. I argue that getting donated computers into the homes of needy students can sometimes have a significant impact on their educational journey.

I’d say it’s definitely worth spending some time browsing Howard Rheingold’s Vlog: http://vlog.rheingold.com/and Clay Burrell’s blog – here’s a favorite short post from there: http://education.change.org/blog/view/tutorial_two_uses_of_technology_to_improve_literacy_and_critical_thinking

Also this commentary by Mike Wesch on Rheingold is a rich, quick read: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=192

Waking up to the economics of networked learning
http://ken-carroll.com/2008/10/09/waking-up-to-the-economics-of-networked-learning/

My own thoughts on academic upstarts, FWIW:
http://www.jarche.com/2008/10/academic-upstarts/

Part of me wants to say don’t read about it, participate. In many ways it’s like reading about a song as opposed to hearing it.

This one by Gardner Campbell might resonate.

I like a number of Jim Groom’s rants on the topic but they tend to be a little manic.

I’d recommend checking out your Lazy Professor presentation.

For me it’s hard to encapsulate in a post or a book. These are things you see demonstrated over time and through people and how they use the technology. Not much help, I know. I’m just not sure there’s a shortcut to this knowledge. Somethings you really should experience.

What about Ev Williams talking about Twitter @ TED 2009!
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evan_williams_on_listening_to_twitter_users.html
I also find Pageflakes by Jackie Gerstein very inspiring in the field of education!
http://www.pageflakes.com/jgerst1111/
Also check out Graham Attwell’s blog http://www.pontydysgu.org/

If looking for shorter reads on the changes happening (as alternative to great books suggestions above), back in early March there was a strong indication of what’s going on in a Clay Shirky piece Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable and Tim O’Reilly’s follow up post (in addition to a rich discussion of the issues involved in the comments). I tried tying it to education here.

Also, this video of Rheingold might be useful.

Once the need for change is recognized, someone has to act in the role of ‘leader’. My favourite read (or listen) on that topic is Tribes by Seth Godin.
http://www.amazon.ca/Tribes-Seth-Godin/dp/1591842336/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243888991&sr=8-1

Seth’s TED talk is another good intro: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/538

I recommend that “Grown Up Digital” by Don Tapscott be on the reading list.

Also, “Disrupting Class” by Curtis Johnson

It’s hard to take such a request seriously, when a five page essay and a 500 page book could each count as ‘one’.

Heidegger’s The Question concerning Technology and this excellent guide to the same for an undersatnding of our realtionship to technology.

Richard Miller’s presentation to the Modern Language Association Presidential Forum. From their blurb: The latest effort by the New Humanities Collaborative to tell the story of how reading and writing have been transformed by the web. What does it mean to write? to read? to publish? The answers to these questions, once obvious, must now be reimagined. Can the educational system rise to the challenge of preparing students to live, work, think, and thrive in an environment of ceaseless change?

Clay Shirky’s blog/essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” for the way it talks about revolution.

edtechlive’s interview with John Seely Brown for the way he atalks about emerging technologies restoring the three pillars of education: family, community & school

and the K12 Horizon Report for a good overview of what’s coming our way.

This is geared toward biz but it can be applied to an educational institution as well.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/05/29.html#a2386.

MacFound’s report seems important: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf
Also maybe “collaboration by difference” and ideas about participatory culture:
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/participatory-learning-and-new-humanities-interview-cathy-davidson

I forgot, if he isn’t reading the Dangerously Irrelevant blog, I highly suggest it. He’s also running a summer reading club that might be useful.
Blip from author’s bio:

Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University. He also is the Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), the nation’s only center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators, and was a co-creator of the wildly popular video, Did You Know? (Shift Happens). Dr. McLeod blogs regularly about technology leadership issues at dangerouslyirrelevant.org.

Wow. I’m flattered to be on this list. Thanks for the recommendation, Greg.

If the purpose of the readings are to “inform his understanding of current changes regarding social networks, knowledge, and technology in education,” then my list of 5 would be (in order):

1. The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner
2. Here Comes Everybody, Shirky
3. Blown to Bits, Abelson, et al.
4. Growing Up Digital, Tapscott
5. What Would Google Do?, Jarvis

Then, if you really want to freak him out, have him read Disrupting Class by Christensen.

Many of the other reads above are excellent but I’m not sure they all get to the heart of your original question. Others do but aren’t as comprehensive a treatment as these books provide. They’re all good, though!

Chasing Cool by Noah Kerner & Gene Pressman. While the book centers on marketing campaigns and brand awareness, it dovetails nicely with social networks and technology in education.

Not that you haven’t got enough but here are a two articles that I’ve used with local leadership:

http://www.edutopia.org/new-face-learning

and

http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

Monika closing comment: “would love to see the final five you come up with.” really resonated with me.

So far we’ve all been dropping off fantastic suggestions but it quickly becomes overwhelming; so much good stuff here. How would be go about synthesizing all these wonderful suggestions into a final five? I can see a short article having equal or more relevance than say a complete book as we consider the significance of the ideas shared.

I’ll have to come back and try to begin sifting through this all myself, but now that we’ve all accumulated such a wealth of good resources, how might we whittle it down to 5 most representative suggestions?

@Andreas I like your idea of clusters very much. I suspect we’d have to sort through this all in phases the first of which might be to whittle it all down to five representative clusters.

Alec’s Dean (or anyone new to this space) wants a 5 item short list of readings to begin to “inform his understanding of current changes regarding social networks, knowledge, and technology in education.” So what 5 categories might we distill from all the above?

After that, we might look at what one suggestion from each category is most representative?

This ain’t gonna be easy. ;-)

37 comments later, and I haven’t even got close to diving into some of the readings unfamiliar with me.

With the last few comments from Darren, Andreas, Kristina, & Monika, I know it will be worth trying to make sense of the readings scattered about, whether it’s clusters or categories, in a wiki or elsewhere. I have a busy month ahead, but after that point I will make some time to push this (and my previous list of vids) into some sort of editable space.

In any case, I think this exercise has gone well beyond my expectations and will be important in itself for my Associate Dean to witness.

Thanks all for contributing, and I hope to see others added in the future. I’ll comment here when I’ve done something with this, and added my own (likely near the end of June). Of course, this information belongs to everyone now so someone may beat me to it.

Thanks again!

Based on the recommendations above, I am amazed, but not surprised, that with the exception of Wenger almost every other “text” recommended is a pop-business book, only tangentially-related to education.

It is also extraordinary that with dozens of “texts’ about “technology and education” recommended, Papert does not appear once. How odd that one of the pioneers of the field, with 40+ years of work in the discipline are so routinely ignored by the edtech community. I wonder why that is?

I assembled the top ten books I think should be on any educator’s bookshelf here – http://tinyurl.com/qboxcj You can take the top five or feel free to mix-and-match.

None of these books can be summarized in a Newsweek article and their ideas are timeless.

If your tastes tend more towards computers-in-education, check out this list – http://tinyurl.com/ood6n2

If you need a book that says the word “Internet” in it, I suggest http://tinyurl.com/opfp6t This 1996 book discusses many of the opportunities that excite the Web 2.0 community.

Hi Alec,

I have to second Gary Stager’s point: It’s a sad commentary when educators find their direction from pop-culture books by Tapscott, Shirky, Friedman, and others. Anyone of those references in a presentation cause a “tune out effect” for me.

Why?

These authors are concerned about writing and selling books. They are trend-chasers. They have their role in society. Popularizing ideas is as unique a skill as generating them in the first place. But, when considering educational reform and gaining a sense of social media trends, I’d be more inclined to turn to sociologists like Barry Wellman, researchers like Grainne Conole/Terry Anderson/Marteen de Laat/Diana Laurillard, etc. These authors might not write with the fluidity of Gladwell, but they’ll at least provide educational leaders with a firm foundation for making decisions.

Your specific question relates to social media trends in education. Writing in distributed cognition (Hutchins, Salomon, Pea), social learning theory (Wenger, Lave, Engestrom, Brown), technological ideology/affordances (Gibson, Postman), and systemic impact (Bates, Twigg) are necessary foundations. From there, technological impact can be found in some of the authors/researchers I noted above (plus Papert, as Stager noted)…etc. This is hardly a complete list. Sawyer’s Handbook of Learning Sciences provides many more. Without sounding like more of a curmudgeon than I already do, I’d humbly offer the view that best sellers are great for pub conversations and blog posts. Educational reform should be based on higher quality (though certainly lessor known) research.

George

@georgesiemens
hm. you’re right with Tapscott etc., but i don’t think it is fair to mention Clay Shirky in the same breath as Gladwell, Friedman et al.. and Postman, at the other side, certainly is not in a different league. (similar with your “connectivism” paradigm itself, BTW.)

intellectually and epistemologically, the most important things now seem to happen *in between* empirical research (wenger …) & traditional theory (engestrom) on one side and “popularizers” on the other side. Stephen B. Johnson’s Emergence, for example, kicks much more than the sum of the empirical researchers he quoted.

Forget the books. Instead be a “mind reader” collaborating as much as possible in any way possible: human interaction through virtual worlds, blogs, face to face conversations, Twitter, online chats, anything where the electrons are still moving rather than petrified on pages like ancient insects in amber. The only exception as a book for me would be the Bible which has the property of perspicuity and can spark with any mind in any culture at any time and readers at any age. But even then I’d prefer online Bibles where variant texts, translations, comments, etc. are possible. And the Bible, too, was delivered through collaboration of persons (Divine & human) and person to person preaching.

My point is that, especially on this topic, whatever you read will be dated a month maybe sooner from the time it was written. The only way to prevent that is collaboration and “mind reading” person to person with the learnin in the exchange. But I’ll stop before writing a “book” of my own here. :)

Lots of great stuff already, but here’s my 2 cents:

Martin Owen, Lyndsay Grant, Steve Sayers and Keri Facer, Social Software and Learning – Future Labs Report July 2006
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/opening_education/Social_Software_report.pdf

Maarten de Laat, Networked Learning, 2006
http://www.e-learning.nl/files/dissertatie%20maarten.pdf

Stephen Downes,The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On, 16-11-2008
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html

George Siemens, Knowing Knowledge, 2006
http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf

Terry Anderson (ed.), The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (2008)
http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/second_edition.html

If your dean is looking for a good basic overview of all the stuff that’s out there, I can suggest Meaningful Learning With Technology by Jonassen, Howland, Marra, and Crismond. For people like us who spend all day and night online, a lot of the content/tools it covers won’t be new to us, but for someone who wants to catch up on the underlying important stuff, this covers it.

The chapters focus on the different roles technology plays in education: investigating, experimenting, supporting writing, modeling, community building, communicating, designing, and visualizing, then assessing meaningful learning. And in each chapter it gives examples of the tools and sites out there that can be used for these purposes.

I have many troubles with my web browser KidNet Explorer on your internet site. The chimpanzees are still in the page :-).

How about the latest Horizon Report? http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/