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In the past, I would have left my impatience get the better of me and disregarded small victories and indicators of change. Experience has taught me to temper my impatience though and to trust my nose when it comes to change. The arrival of change in an organization is a little bit like the arrival of spring in Maine; it take forever. In Maine the arrival of full spring can take until the month of June, but from March to June there are subtle signs that spring is coming. One sign is that things smell different.

Even though many people are pleased with my work here, I’m always striving to do more, to make things better. What I’ve done or what I’m doing isn’t enough, because there is some much more I want to do to make the users experience in the Libraries better. As a result, a part of me feels a little bit like nothing has changed when another part of me knows that things are different.

I am intrigued with David Weinberger's notions of the power of the "new digital disorder",inherent in which is a power shift from a centralized locale to a locus within the individual.

My adult students are mostly open to my enthusiastic embrace of collaboration and the need for shifting to a "power to the people model", but they invariably come back with the realities of the limitations of the K-12, or corporate, or non-profit, or community college environments in which they are employed.

Elaine Garofoli:

What is your vision for change?

What would success look like if we achieved it? What would classrooms look like? How would learning occur? We require a vision for change.

Society understands the importance of a skilled workforce, of critical and creative thinkers. They may not understand wikis, podcasts, or user-created video or collaboratively written software

Parents understand the importance of preparing their children for tomorrow's world. They might not understand RSS, mashups, and blogs

Forget wikis...think collaboration. Forget podcasts...think democracy of voice. Forget RSS/aggregation...think personal networks.

It's the change underlying these tools that I'm trying to emphasize. Forget blogs...think open dialogue.

Or put another way - we are seeking a window dressing solution when it is the house that needs to be renovated.

I'm concerned that the current tone of talk about read/write web tools in the conference circuit is one of shoring up an approach to teaching and learning that is fundamentally at odds with how people learn and interact.

the language of our discipline will continue to render our activities impotent. Will the change come only from conference-tour academics that adopt current trends and present them without passion for change to an audience seeking to hear what's new in tools, but not what's new in process

We are at a point of transition - will our tools be absorbed by education systems, and then become part of the problem?

But the victories feel a bit hollow. Teachers are talking blogs. We want them to talk educational reform. Administrators are talking about "learner-centric". We want them to talk policy, faculty contact hours, preparation time, and open networks.

If your experiences mirror my own, chances are you have only a few colleagues within your organization where you can have a conversation of this nature. Most of your "intellectual colleagues" are probably part of a social network you have created through blogs or other social technologies. So, here we are - more optimistic than educators have been in a long time, feeling that many of the tools we have at our disposal represent the beginnings of a true revolution in education (though we are periodically rebuked by those "who have seen it all before" and are happy to remind us that the same conversation was happening with radio, TV, and whatever else).

those of us in the educational technology space draw on terms and concepts straddling numerous disciplines - psychology, learning theory, technology, and social trends (Freire/Illich-type power issues with a smattering of democracy and undertone of power and opression thrown in) - each generally viewed to be fairly incomprehensible, but when carefully blended, is absolutely alien to the daily thinking habits of most people.

The general sense from the group was “yeah, but” once again. Yeah, but we have these kids who are going to abuse these technologies if we open them up. Yeah, but we’re going to be out there on our own if we decide to use these technologies. Yeah, but I don’t have enough time to make this a part of my own practice. Yeah, but, etc. (And please, if any of those in attendance are reading this, feel free to chime in.) At one point I said something along the lines of “you know, there’s a lot of pressure on you in my circles because many people think nothing is going to change until the old guard retires out and you guys take over.” Well, that didn’t float very well. I got the sense that most didn’t want to accept that challenge or felt it was just too daunting. And at another point, after going through a list of reasons why using these ideas were going to be difficult, I said “yes, but you know there is nothing stopping you from changing the way you learn.”

As we continue to move forward through the new century, as open source and other participatory Web venues become the norm, educators will be facing an even more overwhelming technology learning curve. A new digital divide is in our future, one that is largely generational. At its heart will be the fundamental questions of what "school" really means and whether digital immigrants can ever really get comfortable with a user-generated paradigm.

At a time when students are empowered by their own technology skills, are being asked to innovate and create by the global marketplace, and are no longer dependent on our "permission" to interact with the world's content and each other, what choice do we really have?

The face of education and the idea of the "campus" are changing. Shirazi speaks of the 80 percent of his time not spent in classes, but learning via podcast lectures, Googling for research, and discussions with peers at various campus venues such as the gym or a coffee shop.

Students want free and open access to information. "Teach kids to be careful about what they post on the net as it will be part of their proverbial permanent record," says Ma, who's double majoring in marketing and engineering. "But after discussing what's right, wrong, and appropriate, and arming students with that knowledge, back off with the rules and the filtering and let them take responsibility."

November cites the use of Logo in schools in the early '80s and the widespread belief then that all kids needed to know Logo. Later, educators were forced to acknowledge that Logo wasn't transferable to the real world. "Learning Logo would have been one of the standards," November remarks. "It wasn't thought through."

tech guru Alan November.
A NETS critic from the start, November balks at the standards for trying to impose standardization at all and for their lack of foresight in not taking into account the rapid rate of technology change.

How do we empower and protect our students in an environment that increasingly excludes us?

On a typical day after school, you'll find Hannah in her bedroom, iPod charging on the desk, headphones in ears, cell phone in one hand, paperback book in the other, television tuned to a Gilmore Girls rerun, and computer with display divided among iTunes, YouTube, a Pride and Prejudice DVD, and, of course, MySpace, which she constantly checks for messages from friends.