It is a great pleasure and honor to be here in Atlanta and to be working with fellow educators from the south. I can almost smell the moss growing on ancient oaks. It will be a three day institute, where participants will be creating masterpieces. The topics will be blogging, podcasting, digital story telling, and other themes envolved in expressing ideas compellingly using networked digital information.

I’m kicking things off with an overview of the new web and the new shape of information.

Online handout can be accessed at:

• The New Shape of Information

The participant’s wiki handouts are at:

• DEN RI Handouts

I talked with a marketing person at ePals yesterday, and he was sharing the flood of interest they were getting at conferences regarding their new classroom blogging tool. It seems, that through all of the MySpace sensationalism, people are recognizing that there is something to this new read/write web that is drawing the attention of our students — and isn’t that what we try to do in our classrooms?

I’m in Chapel Hill, North Carolina introducing educators to blogging, podcasting, and a host of other Web 2.0 tools. This is the first day of an institute for these teachers. My job is to share with them the what and the why of the new web, and we will be utilizing a number of Web 2.0 applications as part of the day’s workshop. Topics will include blogging, podcasting, wikis, RSS, social bookmarks, aggregators, and social media.

You’ll find the online wiki handouts at:

• The New Shape of Information

Today, I have a unique opportunity to work with a special group of educators in Sarasota, Florida. First of all, you are all high school teachers. Your job is especially information-intensive. Secondly, you are a group of educators who have been given access to a great deal of technology and training, the goal being to produce teachers of the future. Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to this staff development.

We are spending the day exploring Web 2.0 technologies, looking specifically at blogging, wikis, RSS, aggregators, social bookmarks, and podcasting. This is a pretty tall order, but you are teachers who have chosen retool for 21st century teaching and learning.

Online handouts for this workshop are available at the following web site:

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information

You can also access the workshop wiki notes here or click to them from the online handouts, above.

What a wonderful place for a conference. It’s a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but quite comfortable in the shade. This is very weird to this southern boy. The Amphitheater School District has organized a literacy conference here for several years. This year, they’re looking to the future, mapping a new literacy for the students of theirs and other districts in Arizona.

I’ll be doing three half day workshops on contemporary literacy and a keynote address. The bottom line about literacy, is that it describes the skills necessary to use information in answering questions, solving problems, and accomplishing goals. As the nature of information changes, so to must our definition of literacy. Information is no longer merely a commodity to be purchased and read, looked at, listened to, and watched. Information is now a raw material to be mixed and remixed. Many of our students already understand this.