Will Richardson's Passions


Will is presently giving a workshop on how to apply Web. 2.0 tools to learning for a group of administrators in DuPage County, IL. There's a lot of excitement about these tools, mainly because I think that people sense his passion for how students learn.

During the workshop, Will is emphasizing his own learning through conversations with people, mostly through blogs, and is asking us to examine how we learn. This is a recurring theme with Will. He stated in his blog that “the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.”

This theme is a necessary reminder and leads us into another recurring theme of Will’s that “teaching is modeling”, and unless we display and affirm our learning processes to our students, they will not be able to understand how to develop their own learning processes/systems/networks.

Will stated “if we educators don’t take the lead on this and soon, we’re going to be rendered irrelevant. As I’ve said before, we don’t own the content any more, and what we should own, the mastery of how to use that content, is sorely lacking. Unless we become able to teach and model effective practice in short order, it will be more than passivity that we’ll have to deal with.”

On a side note, a great resource he showed us is his wiki on Why the Read / Write Web Changes Everything. Check out his examples!!


References

Owning the Teaching…and the Learning
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2006/owning-the-teachingand-the-learning/

The Flattening of the World and Pancakes
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2005/04/03