Month: May 2006

I’m off today for Ausburg college and the 2006 Minnesota e-Learning Summit, in Minneapolis. I do not know very much about this conference. It’s organized by Minnesota Government Training Services, which appears to do a lot of professional development activities and not just in education.

I’ll be delivering the opening Keynote tomorrow on twenty-first century literacy and then sessions on Telling the New Story session and Web 2.0. Friday will be kicked off by Marc Prensky, and I’m dang disappointed I’ll miss that. I’ve heard Marc speak once, and I like his style and his message. I’ll be tagging this conference with MELS, for Minnesota e-Learning Summit, if anyone wants to follow along.

The first half of this week had me at the NC Distance Learning Alliance conference in Asheville. It was a small conference on the beautiful campus of Asheville-Buncombe Community College. Many of the attendees were community college instructors and administrators, quite a few university level folks, and a surprising number of K-12 educators. I guess I think of distance learning as being more of a post-secondary thing, but some of the most passionate ideas were coming out of the K-12.

I commented on Susan Patrick’s keynote the first of the week, and although I do not agree with everything that she said, I believe now that it is a valuable conversation to be having. In two sentences:

I do not believe that distance learning is a solution for a teacher shortage. The solution is retooling the profession so that many many more talented college students will want to enter the field, and more teachers will want to stay.

That said, I love any conference that I walk away from with new ideas, new validations — and when I walk away a different man, because the vista of my professional vision is broadened. And that certainly happened in Asheville.

So much of what I heard people talking about in sessions and in casual conversations resonated richly with my rantings about contemporary literacy. As I said earlier this week, distance learning happens in a digital, networked, and overwhelming information environment. Teachers and students must practice contemporary literacy in order to do their jobs. The model is there, and it is evolving very rapidly, much more so than in traditional classrooms — and the reason is that you can’t push paper through the Internet. Only bits and bytes. This is a group I’m going to pay a lot of attention to.

And they went “gaga” over blogging and Web 2.0.

[This is moblogged in real time. Please forgive typos and awkward wording]

I’ve not had the opportunity to hear Susan Patrick before. As someone said as I was setting up, she has a long and very distinguished history. Today she is speaking from her capacity as the President/CEO of the North American Council for Online Learning. The opening session is beginning with a welcome message from the chair of the conference committee. There are people here from all over the state, mostly from community colleges and universities.

I’m paying attention now to the president of the Asheville Community College. I thing that I see, that is counter-intuitive to what you might think, is that the attendees of the conference about teaching online, are a very rich community.

Susan Patrick just asked for a raise of hands by schooling level, and I’m surprised to see that between K-12 and higher ed, the breakdown is about 50-50. Patrick was the lead in writing the National education technology plan, and she traveled to 46 of the 50 states, Mexico, and China. She’s talking about how much technology as changed in her lifetime, from punch cards to calculators (that cost $450). She tells a very compelling story that explains why our children are so get so annoyed by our fascination with how much technology has changed.

Susan Patrick says that what she reshaped our vision of education from the data on how children use the Internet and focus sessions they had with authors of Millennials Rising and other futurist works.

200,000 students from across the U.S. participated in a survey, and it all changed the shape that education should take in the future.

Patrick is promoting distance learning as a solution to many of the problems we are facing in education. We don’t have enough teachers, and we aren’t going to get them. We need to be doing more teaching on line. I won’t say “bah!” This is a conversation that need to be held, and participated in by a log of people.

• Mexico has digitized their entire curriculum and that’s what’s given to their teachers. “They’re thinking systemically.”
• Graduation rate in this country is 70%
• 26% finish 2 years of college
• 80 – 90% of jobs require at least an associates degree.
• IBM created bubble sheets in the 1950s so that they could grade three answers at a time. Where else do we use bubble sheets? (Hmmmm! says a lot)
• In the florida virtual school, online course completion rate is 96%.
• AP pass rates are 60%. For Florida virtual high school, it’s 70%
• more than a third of school districts in the U.S. offer online learning opportunities.

Patrick’s elevator speech is:

1. online expands options (high schools offer online course because otherwise they would not be available)
2. online learning is grown rapidly (30%/year)
3. Online learning is effective (research shows that it is equal or better than face-to-face)
4. Online learning improves teaching

You take a teacher who’s been teaching for a few years, if they go through an online learning to teach online, they become a better teacher.

Patrick just said something that I think is very important. Please typically write more in an online learning environment than in face-to-face. This is important, because as people write about what they are learning, they tend to become more fluent in the issues of the topic.

That’s my 2¢ worth.

She says that education is designed to be stable, to change slowly. She says that online learning will power the redesign of education. I’m not going to disagree. I’m rethinking online learning a lot right now.

96% of students believe that education is important for their later life. So why are we losing a third of them before they graduate from high school?

I believe that I am going to enjoy a unique experience today. I’m speaking at the North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance conference in magnificent Asheville, North Carolina. I know a number of educators who will be hear, teachers and administrators who have dedicated a great deal of their time and formidable creativity to distance learning. It’s a topic that I have not focused very much attention to. We choose what we want to concentrate on, and the technology and technique of DL has not been one of my choices. Yet, I’m intrigued by what has been accomplished, and have even found that teaching from a distance has some interesting appeal to it.

Today, I’ll be doing my “Telling the New Story” presentation, and I confess that I’ve worried a bit about how much this presentation be of value to this audience. However, having just gone over the address, I’m pretty confidence that it speaks to their interests and mission. In fact, I’m even more intrigued by their experience, as online educators. I have often blogged about how, if we are truly going to integrate contemporary literacy into our classrooms, we need to simply throw out all of the paper and books, and transform our classrooms into exclusively digital environments, and then “teach”. Well these folks have already done, just that.

I’m looking forward to this two day conference and will likely be blogging the experience, taking pictures, and maybe even interviewing a few of the people I meet. I’ll be tagging my e-correspondes with “ncdla” for North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance.