Well said! What a difference a word makes! Especially when one of the absolute best things about the Internet in my experience is how it crosses all kinds of national boundaries with ease. :-)
I wondered about this, too, Steve - after all, I would not have even known about this report unless I had read about at YOUR blog. At least in terms of the educational networks I am part of, news of this report had not yet spread - when I let people know about it, they told me it was the first they had heard of it.
So true for teachers AND so true for students: we take pride and are committed to the things we create, build, grow, own. In a small way, that can even happen here - the report is just a report, but where it becomes valuable for me is through this kind of dialogue. I am amazed and surprised (in a good way) that they allow these comments, and thanks to RSS, I saw that you had added your thoughts here, too.
Steve, I really agree about that - I've probably joined 20 or so online network to end up with the 2 or 3 that I participate in very regularly - so I too would be wary of any rigid measure of success; it's almost like I had to pass through all those other "failed" networks to make the successful one happen, as I learned just what it was I wanted, and didn't want, in the network I would participate in. Plurality, fluidity, spontaneity - those are all important factors!
I am very impressed by the openness of this document and how easy it is to add comments so that an actual conversation can take place. Quite a contrast to the recent process by which comments were "invited" by Natl. Governors Assoc. for the Common Core Standards (and those comments just disappeared into a black hole apparently, while all we got in return were generic emails as if the commenting had never happened and as if we were all in love with Common Core). I look forward to reading more comments here as they accumulate. Thank you for the opportunity to participate.
I credit Steve Hargadon's Classroom2.0 with really waking me up to the power of social learning. As Classroom2.0 got very large, one of its participants, the wonderful Connie Weber, created a Ning, FiresideLearning, which recruited folks from Classroom2.0 who wanted a smaller Ning experience. We've been going strong for some years now. I do not have enough good things to say about the Ning experience: if Dept. of Ed. could offer a free Ning-like network, that would already be something wonderful and very welcome. Kudos to Steve Hargadon for having been such a great leader in all of this! I use a Ning (which I pay for out of pocket) for my online courses at the Univ. of Oklahoma - what a great way for people to share and learn together online!
RSS please!!! Plus, take a lesson from the great widgets that Twitter offers, allowing people to embed a nice content stream (their own tweets, or tweets from a list of accounts) in other webpages, etc.
Please don't forget social sign-on - you are not starting from a blank slate here! For people who have active Facebook, Google or Twitter online identities already, being able to use that log in with a network is great. Ning.com now supports Google and Facebook sign-ons and I believe they are about to support Twitter sign-on also. I sure hope this kind of social sign-on will be part of what this program will promote; don't wall yourselves off from all the great stuff already going on at Ning, Facebook, Twitter and so on, including people already using Google to blog, etc.
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