Steve Hargadon is the guest speaker at tonight’s EdTech Leadership Network meeting at SCOE (Sacramento COE). What a treat to spend some f2f time with the father of Support Blogging! Steve also facilitates the other great projects such as the Open Source Pavillion at NECC and EduBloggercon – an un-conference- www.edubloggercon.wikispaces.com , and Classroom 2.o. And he has recently taken job with CoSN.

My first visit to his Support Blogging site (a site he developed “to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, administrators, parents, and others to help promote an understanding of the benefits of educational blogging”) was after meeting Steve following one of Will Richardson’s talks at NECC 2006 (where I purchased a handful of Support Blogging buttons). I’ve since become a regular visitor and include some of the interviews in my workshops (i.e., Nancy Willard for iSafety). Steve shared that he added wikis to his toolkit following the introduction of DOPA legislation. The original intent morphed into a variety of blogging sites – much like a forest fire. “In a compressed timeframe, you can create content of value to people.”

Below are some of Steve’s points on “Why Web 2.0 is so important”:

• Cell phone – this is just the start!
• 1.0 – reflected intellectual and cultural information of centuries. Read medium.
• 2.0 – read/write – but mostly for younger folks (so far), e.g., uploading 1000s of photos on Flickr and then checking for comments made by friends.
• 2.0 = creating, connecting, contributing, collaborating, helping, sharing, communicating
• Blogs – chronological (is somewhat of a flaw) but nevertheless have grown incredibly. Darren Kuraopatwa AP Calculus– has daily math scribe creating content.
• Social Networks- MySpace demonstrates what’s going on. Allows you to define yourself, to project an image (of your choosing). Check out FaceBook – cleaned up version of MySpace. A few stats:
  • Unparalleled creation of content: 70 mill weblogs120,000 new weblogs each day; 1.4 new blogs every second. MySpace get 375,000 new members daily (with 172 million members = 6th most populous country in world = in between Brazil & Pakistan)

• Podcasts – Mr. Langhorst’s web classroom – Liberty Missouri. Contacts authors and interviews them. Also gives study tasks podcasts to prep students for upcoming history tests (70-80% of his kids listen to them). Runkle School runs book review podcasts.

• Photo Sharing – Flickr has great Web2.0 feature of labeling photos. Ringo – kids correspond about photos.
• Wikis – “A web page with an Edit Button.” Better than a blog. Main content page (V. Tech example), discussion page, history page. You can add “notify me” option to post. You couldn’t do this with regular media.
• Some additional comments and discussion:
  • Perceptions of Ed Tech – “We’ve over-promised and under-delivered” (Sorry, I missed the source of the quote). “We ‘ve brought technology into the classroom, but we haven’t let it transform education.”
  • Video sharing – engaging technologies – % of time on tv is declining. We’re glued to computer – Happening outside of traditional environments – without parent supervision. “Disinhibition” – we need to help kids out with this. “Hey” clip on YouTube. Checkout stats. “Attention” is huge motivator!

A good way to connect with Steve’s work is via www.Classroom20.com and www.Classroom20.net (wiki) and Classroom 2.0. Lucky me…I’ll be joining Steve for the tail end of EduBloggerCon (an “un-conferece) at NECC 2007!
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