Well, its taken me a while to get back here, but after many forgotten passwords I’ve decided to give it another go round.  First, its been quite the few months of exploring, playing, and learning about web 2.0, et al, through WC!.   I truly appreciate this sometimes frustrating but mostly enjoyable opportunity for not only professional developement, but also personal developement.  Where I am now with web 2.0 tools is light years beyond where I might have been through casual osmosis of interesting and perhaps relevant technology. I have made a personal investment to learn through play and experimentation. Perhaps not as much as I would have liked, but certainly more than others have been able to do. My tech learning is still in its infancy.

One of the rewarding experiences has been Twitter, a micro-bloging social network site. As a Twitteratus, one of the few Twitterati in the WCSD, I follow regular updates by Will Richardson, and occasionally read his blog. I first met Will at one of our Superintendent’s days. I, like many others, enjoy his insight and provocative, relevant thinking. It was through a link on Twitter that I read his entry “21st Century Skills for Educators”, posted on March 9.  Evidently, it was a pretty impassioned rant having generated over 100 comments and almost 40 other blogs about it.  Here is Will’s blog:   http://weblogg-ed.com/

I think we’ve heard it before, but Will articulates it so perfectly: faculty and administrators should use and model the use of Web 2.0 tools if they expect students to use them too. Fair enough. How much of a learning curve ought there be before one starts to model? Do I know enough now? Why am I fearful, or at least not confident, to engage my students? Web 2.0 could really be a transformative pedagogy. Instead of subscribing to the banking theory of education, I should just jump in and become a co-learner, and co-teacher, with my students (Freire, 1970).

How about co-learning and co-teaching with my peers while on the learning curve?  Instead of just the WC! group, why not open up this blog site to the rest of the district?  The last post here was three months ago. Not much use; not much to model. What if everyone in the district had a browser that opened to GoogleReader? 

One of the subsequent blog entries generated from Will’s post was Britt Watwoods “Learning in a Flat World”.  http://bwatwood.edublogs.org/2008/03/12/wills-hot-button/

He talks about the tension, I might call it stress, between the technology side and the people side of a journey into Web 2.0.  It does take some internalization and loads of personal investment to begin using these tools when the average teacher is being pulled in multiple directions by muliple commitments and responsibilities.  He suggests the need for those of us in the first Web 2.0 wave to assist our peers in visualizing the possibilities of the power embodied in these 21st century tools-  co-teachers and co-learners in transformative pedagogy.