newly ancient

This has been cross-posted from the new Students 2.0 blog. Please write your comments there, not here.

I live in two small towns. One, in rural Vermont, fits the classic definition of a small town: a quaint town hall and white church. Even more importantly: the community is closely knit. Whenever any interesting event happens, everybody knows about it within 24 hours. News spreads like wildfire; and our town town paper only comes out every month. We do not rely upon formal systems to spread the news. Instead, every person leverages their social network (the analog kind) to spread the news. Some people have immense networks (mayoral candidates) while others might only share the news with a couple of people. Regardless of how they learn it, within a week everyone knows about Mary’s new son.

I also live in another kind of small town. In this town, I control who attains citizenship. I am able to sculpt this village (network) to my exact tastes; creating a village with only those who interest me. This is a crucial aspect of our new networks—it is constantly engaging. How often have you been in a room filled with people but felt completely alone? This does not happen in our personal networks built online. Whether you agree with those in your learning network or not, they are always a source of a good conversation. Consequently, everyone in the network grows closer and closer into a tightly knit community.

While many attempts have been made to map the internet before, too many of them focus upon the what and the how rather than the who. One of my favorite maps of the internet shows each tool as a country. I believe this is fundamentally wrong, because we build our network around the people, not the place. It doesn’t take a plane ticket to get from Myspace to Facebook—it takes a couple of steps. Usually, most of your network will walk right along with you. Thus, it really just becomes a matter of walking down the streets with your friends with your network. Together, you form a small village, with location based upon similarities in interests, not on geography (both physical and virtual).

Just like in a real village, the news in our virtual (social) villages spreads like wildfire. From person to person, the news is passed. Never have I seen a more perfect example of this than with Students 2.0. In our first day alone, we got over 2,500 visits to our splash page. A significant portion of these visits can be attributed to the power of Twitter and our personal learning network. When we first launched the splash page, I watched as the tweets flew by—the village truly came through for us. The gossip certainly triggered an amazing reaction, which ended up growing exponentially.

After the original buzz on Twitter, the local (to our social village) news media came in. In our social village, this is the blogosphere. Seeing the amount of gossip and buzz happening, the local news media believes it merits a story. Of course, once one newspaper picks up the story, the rest follow. Shortly, over 100 stories were written about Students 2.0: bringing in even more gossip and conversation; the self generated P.R. cycle continues. Of course, then it is time to pull in a camera crew to produce a video.

Seeing the success of the video, even more people talked about Students 2.0 and learned about the project. Continually, the vibrations resonate through the village. A town bell has been rung, and everyone congregates on the town green, eager to hear the news.

The launch of Students 2.0 has been a great example of how powerful our social villages can be. I myself have learned a lot about myself, marketing, and the world through the participation in this project and the dialogue with my social village.

Going back to my real world village, I bemoan the location of my high school; it is outside of the village. While both are dependent upon each other, the school is not a part of the village. Consequently, all of the conversations happening within the village rarely infiltrate the thick walls of school. However, as I have seen with Students 2.0, our social villages can add immense value—both professionally and personally. By not utilizing this network, schools become stagnant; news flows slowly and change moves at a snails pace.

A critical step forward for schools would be to embrace the social villages of students and faculty alike. Schools should be developing portals and websites which take into account the social aspects of our lives. Even more importantly, once those networks are developed, the users should have the ability to welcome others into their village; too often we see systems which further isolate the school community from the larger social community.

This doesn’t need to be a radical step. Rather, a control system can and should be adopted—just as we selectively chose the citizens in our social villages (Twitter). Regardless of how this change is accomplished, it must come about; if schools continue to be separate from our social villages, our villages will continue to evolve exponentially while schools will stay rooted in the past.

The social villages we build around us—spanning various mediums—extend our mind and offer immense power which schools would do well to integrate rather than ignore.

When the New York Times reported an increase in 8th grade test results, I went on to inspect the reason. Middle school achievement scores are some of the most important to study, since that is the time when I feel students feel the most disconnect from school. In lower grades, students do the work and respect the system because teachers and parents do so. However, once students reach middle school, they no longer take the word of adults as law. Meanwhile, they have not yet acquired the pressure to build a strong transcript which comes from high school and the college application process. Therefore, middle school achievement is of particular concern. When I read that New York districts had succeeded in reversing the trend, I was very interested to see how they had managed to get students more involved in school. Unfortunately, I soon learned that schools had run away from the problem. Instead of getting students motivated about learning, they are simply focusing only on what the state requires for testing. In the words of Dr. Lodovico, they are simply teaching to the tests. Perhaps this will look better to parents and politicians, but I thought school was supposed to be about students, not scores. In 20 years, when the students of today are well on their way in life, how will knowledge of material on a long since deprecated test serve them? Instead of creating test taking machines, we should be inspiring students to become life long learners.