Getting students to develop a “target setting” mentality would be a great use of 43 tools.

Not sure that it needs to be done behind a firewall – although some way to provide a student sign up in groups (by School, by Year Group?) might be useful.

The public scrutiny/connectivity is part of the appeal – and the possibility of international connectivity is very exciting.

I’m seeing more obstacles than opportunities in formalized education settings, unfortunately.

If students are participating in the wide-open community, educators will be uncomfortable with the possibilities for kids coming into contact with unsavory characters or content. Assigning something that opens students to potential violations of their privacy makes them very nervous, even though most the kids couldn’t care less.

On the other hand, if you give them a “closed” version that only lets them interact with students in the same school (or class), you cut off the potential for “expert” input, limiting the number of people who might have actually done some of the things people want to do. You also decrease the chances of finding a single other person who shares your niche interest or goal. With a small pool of potential participants, they might as well just use a message board or form face-to-face clubs or whatever.

This emerging community encourages a type of authenticity in personal learning that may be the antithesis of school. 43 Things is self-directed, focusing only on the things that interest me most, then connecting me to everyone else who shares those goals or can offer some advice on how to achieve them. I can hardly wait to see more of those learning conversations develop here. It’s real learning (condescendingly referred to as “informal learning”), but the education system isn’t all that interested in it.

Schools tell kids, “you will absorb what you are told and regurgitate it on tests when you are told to do so, at the same pace as everyone else, whether you want to or not.” Send a kid into 43 Things with a few prescribed “learning goals” she doesn’t care about, and the whole exercise becomes a waste of everyone’s time.

The only potential use I see is in supporting students in achieving their broader goals, using a sort of peer counselling model. In academic areas, it could be used to support homework groups and planning programs in new ways…but these things could probably be done as well with boring old blogs/wikis/message boards. E-portfolios seem like a real stretch too.

Sorry, this isn’t very helpful. I’ll have to think of some constructive ideas to balance these off.

One use we thought of in using social networking tools was to connect people in academic communities. For example, if I’m interested in educational access for girls in rural Thailand, how do I find other people who are interested in the same thing? Are there standard keywords or a browse hierarchy that topic falls under? Most probably, no, but I might use something like 43 Things to find other people who describe it similarly and eventually connect and work with them.

For younger students (secondary school), it could work similarly, especially given that students have their own lingos to describe themselves—vocabularies which, again, cannot be captured in hard-coded keywords or browse hierarchies. Anyways, we want the computer to find our match; we don’t want to have to click around to find them.

In terms of the privacy/safety issues regarding students, there should be some kind of moderated community function.

Having worked for many years in both (often at the same time…I’m in Knowledge Mgmt), I would want to test out some questions about how the a closed culture (a school, a company) would inhibit or derail an application like this. Let me explain.

If we contribute here, we can do so anonymously, for better AND worse. We can choose who sees our identity, or, if someone sees our identity…who cares? Maybe they live halfway around the world and it won’t affect our career or our life at school.

Closed systems where someone’s identity is attached to their online work tend to make many people more inhibited. Not everyone, but enough people. Or maybe they won’t address a topic because of its sensitivity. My site linked here is a great example. I write another blog but can’t “let fly” about depression because it would affect my career and others’ behavior towards me. I don’t care what people THINK of my depression, but I can’t risk losing my job over it.

On topics where people SHOULDN’T feel inhibited (like a professional topic…say…consulting on logistics), many people will feel inhibited because of wanting to manage others’ impressions of their work, and because of their assumptions about politics and power. A corporate culture would have to operate as close to a meritocracy as you could get to really make this fly. Unfortunately, I’ve only worked for two companies where we got close to this kind of culture and they both changed as they grew. And I consider myself pretty lucky to have gotten that close twice out of three times.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t work…in fact, the possibility of making this work is very exciting. AND, I would want to begin with smaller groups within an institution and see where they took it before rolling it out institution-wide and blowing a chance at a great implementation using what was learned in a smaller group.

Man, that is a huge run-on sentence, but I am really tired now…

Sorry that I’m so late to the discussion.

One of the things that good e-learning platforms are beginning to do is to create powerful user profiles.

The most powerful thing a good secondary school can do is to make connections between students and teachers. I don’t think of this as a tool for assessment—I want my students to write in a meaningful place and to think about audience and voice. I want the teachers to be part of the space and I want there to be an expectation that students will become involved in creating topics, cheering others, etc..

We still need tools like this to break the spell that classrooms have one teacher, one authority. We also need to make sure that students become better thinkers and writers when their peers cheer them, not just when they get a grade on a paper.