I had the privilege to attend the dedication of the USS Oklahoma Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 2007. I was part of a team which facilitated a great videoconference involving survivors of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with lots of Oklahoma K-12 students. that videoconference is archived on:

http://okwwii.wetpaint.com/page/Videoconference+6+Dec+2007

Last week I published a podcast audio recording of the docent aboard the USS Missouri describing the surrender of the Japanese to US leaders in Tokyo harbor on September 2, 1945. That is available on:

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2008/01/05/podcast214-surrender-of-the-japanese-to-the-united-states-aboard-the-uss-missouri-a-re-enactment-in-pearl-harbor-hawaii/

More photos of Pearl Harbor, the USS Oklahoma Memorial, the USS Missouri, etc are available on:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/collections/72157603386706662/

My wife and I are starting to teach a new evening class at our church this week called "Digital Dialog." Our goal is to encourage the safe, appropriate and fun use of the Internet by parents and kids. I think we need to have more conversations about MySpace and other digital social networking environments, and not just ban them from our schools and homes without understanding them. I'm not saying I think MySpace is appropriate for teaching, but I also am not convinced that it should be blocked on all school networks for all kids regardless of age. We need to recognize that the purpose of education is to prepare kids for LIFE, not to just take tests.

Many school leaders seem to be more motivated by fear rather than vision today, and I think the same sort of discussions I have professionally with school leaders and teachers regarding safe digital social networking, the safe uses of blogs, etc. need to include more parents.

We setup a free Imbee group that anyone can join, and a wikispaces site to post all the content for our sessions. The website is:

http://digitaldialog.wikispaces.com/
I'm sharing my session on "safe digital social networking" again tomorrow for educators, but this time in St Louis, Missouri. Links from that session (including videos and podcasts of previous sessions) are available on:

http://teachdigital.pbwiki.com/safedsn

The first annual K-12 Online Conference kicked off today with a great pre-conference keynote by David Warlick. Please join in this FREE event for and by teachers around the globe, to learn more about how web 2.0 tools can be used safely and effectively in K-12 classrooms to help engage students and develop the literacy skills they need today and will need in the future!

A formal press release about the event is also available. Spread the word! :-)

The "Deleting Online Predators Act" passed the US House of Representatives last week. While all adults should want to protect young people, this bill is poorly written and a bad idea.

Take a look at the legislation yourself and see what you think. It would ban access to ALL commercial social networking websites-- many if not most schools now already ban DSN (digital social networking) sites like MySpace, but this would probably would result in most of the web 2.0 or read/write web sites being blocked, including Flickr. Saveyourspace.org has a long list of sites they think will be blocked at all schools and public libraries if DOPA passes. My prediction is, unfortunately, that it probably will given the current climate in the US Congress.

The Opposing DOPA wiki (http://dopa.pbwiki.com) has good links and resources for contacting your Senator and telling them to NOT vote for this legislation. If you are in a church or interested in attending one, give a read to my main blog post Respond to DOPA with Moodle at your church.

We need to all learn more about using tools like MySpace safely and powerfully. That was the focus of my first presentation last week at the MTI conference in Winfield, Kansas. If you're interested in learning more, you can listen to a podcast of my session, titled "Safe Digital Social Networking".

I learned about the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform a couple of weeks ago listening to a podcast in my car driving from Oklahoma City back to Lubbock, and just got around to posting about it on my main blog this evening. ("Sea change in our educational culture")

It absolutely makes me SICK to see how many teachers today still think their primary role is to feed worksheets to students and make others engage with CONTENT more than IDEAS and in RELATIONSHIPS. As a student myself, I want to be engaged in the classroom and work on tasks that are both relevant and meaningful to me. I think this is something all learners want. That is why I am so excited to learn about the Schlechty Center. In my new professional role for AT&T here in the state of Oklahoma, I hope I'll be able to learn more about the Schlechty Center and help teachers and administrators adopt their teaching philosophy which emphasizes ENGAGEMENT and SUSTAINED INNOVATION.

Boy do we ever need both of those things in the US educational system today!

I recently learned about Tor, which is free software distributed by EFF permitting users to circumvent traffic monitoring software and other content blocking software on networks. Personally, I often teach at schools where different sites are blocked, sometimes even Google! I can see this being a very handy tool that could let me show some websites to other teachers that might be otherwise inaccessible. I am also thinking it could be handy to utilize my instant messaging software programs, even if those programs are blocked on that local network. I am thinking that school district IT folks will find a way to circumvent this, but I have not heard of them doing it yet. I am guessing that relatively few people in the education space (at least K-12) are using Tor. It would be interesting to know how many university students are using it. I am not sure but I do not think there is huge awareness at this point for why software like this could be useful.

I am interested to know if using Tor is just as effective as using a free VPN solution like Hamachi for protecting your passwords and identity when you're using a public WiFi connection. There are plenty of legitimate uses of Tor I can think of, but also many that are not. It will be interesting to see if it is even possible to videoconference through Tor on a school network that is setup to typically block those types of connections. I would suspect that the program would throttle down available bandwidth to the point where videoconferencing would not be practical, but that may not be the case. I will hopefully get to test this in upcoming months as I travel around doing different workshops for teachers in schools.

Boy it is really hard to be patient! I have been in the job hunt for the past year, and several prospects are looking good, and I just want to KNOW what we're going to be doing!!! I hope we'll hear soon. Even if you have faith (as I do) that things are going to work out well, and there is "a plan" for my life, etc.... it is hard to wait!

I was asked recently if I had considered starting an educational advocacy group, and I've been giving this some more thought. I was really convicted this past Friday by Dr. David Berliner's talk at the Texas Tech College of Education regarding NCLB, I titled the podcast of his talk "High Stakes Testing is the Enemy" on my blog.

I need to give this some more thought, but I think this may be something I'll attempt with others. One goal, for example, would be to provide shared resources that people can use when they go to their local school board or PTA group to talk about school reform issues. Sort of like some of the Save Darfur websites are doing, providing powerpoints, statistics, photos, resources. The collaborative power of web 2.0 and social networking sites can be leveraged powerfully here.

The bottom line to what I am thinking, which is something Dr. Berliner discussed, is that we have to take back our communities and our schools one at a time, at a very local level. This is not a call for a TV ad campaign, it is an initiative asking people to get informed and engage in conversations with each other and their neighbors regarding the schools our kids need and deserve. I am going to do a podcast on my main blog soon, probably later this week, further developing these ideas. But just the stories that I heard from last week's TAKS testing here in Lubbock were ridiculous. One 3rd grader came home perceiving that her teacher had threatened her with taking away her summer vacation if she didn't do well on the test. One principal of a local school was lauded in front of other administrators for staying with a child at school till 10 pm when they finished their TAKS test. That is ridiculous! We shouldn't be praising people for doing that, we should be questioning the idiocy of system where that type of behavior can actually be admired! They both should have called it quits by at least 6 pm and gone home to their families. But with so much on the line in high stakes testing environments, people can and do behave irrationally.

I do not want to just write and rant about things like this, I want to ACT and encourage others to do the same. Our legislature is meeting again here in Texas, in special session, and discussing school finance reform as well as other school reforms. We need to switch paths, and get off this road of high stakes accountability! I am thinking a web-based educational advocacy group could help propel this cause forward.

The PBS website that accompanies tonight's Frontline special, "The Tank Man," is excellent.

As citizens of planet earth, we should oppose the Chinese government's oppression of its people. Its suppression of the Chinese people's fundamental human right to express themselves. To let their voices be heard. To learn about the 1989 student-led revolution in Tiananmen Square.



Do you know about Hao Wu and why he should be freed? Are you doing anything about it? At a minimum, blog about it and tell others. Ideas and information are powerful things. Why do you think the Chinese government is struggling so hard to control them?

It's because they are scared. And they should be. Because they are going to lose. They may put hundreds and even thousands of more people in prison, and kill untold legions of their citizens, but they will lose.

The information genie is out of the bottle. They can't shut down the Internet. And praise God, they cannot shut me up or you either. We must speak out. And take action.

These are issues worth caring about. They are ideals worth dying for. People have, and they likely will again. Why have they paid the ultimate sacrifice, and why are more still willing to pay that price?

Because they believe in ideals that are greater than themselves. Many of these ideas are embodied in a document adopted by the United Nations in 1948, named The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are UNIVERSAL because they apply to everyone.

Morality is not relative. Human rights are for everyone. Are you listening to the global voices writing and talking about these issues and others THAT MATTER? Are you offering your own opinions in this global conversation?

You should be. Because these conversations matter. They are going to change the world.

Many people wonder what it means to "succeed" in life. The world says that to succeed, you need to make a lot of money, own a lot of stuff, have a lot of things. We all definitely need money to survive, but there is much more to "success" than what the world says. I like what the US philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said about success, which I have included on my own "favorite quotations" page:

SUCCESS

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson