Month: May 2009

This blog post started out as a reference to Alan Levine’s February instructions for tricking CoolIris into a presentation tool — which I wanted to post to a private blog I have for shelving ideas to return to at some point. But I decided to post it here, as the article grew and it’s implications became more apparent. We live and are raising and educating our children in a world where a kid in a garage can dramatically alter an industry. Think about what Sergey Brin and Larry Page did to Yahoo, and how YouTube impacted Google Video. Here, I’m talking about CoolIris, started by three recent Stanford grads, and in less detail, about Prezi, developed by two guys in Budapest, Hungary.  Are these Powerpoint killers?  I do not know!  Probably not.  But they indicate a time when geography, age, language, culture, all take a back seat to your ability to observe, think, context, improvise, build, and provoke.

A CoolIris display of images. ((http://www.flickr.com/photos/acoustic_punk_sound/3062605208/))

I’ve seen this done with varying degrees of success, using CoolIris as a presentation tool.  I’ve resisted trying it, because I am not that interested in having to upload my slides to Flickr to display them, and I am a vicious slide deck rearranger. However, with CoolIris now accessing files from your iPhoto library, there may be more room for those “morning of” customizations.

Of course I’m speaking from inexperience.  Alan Levine (CogDogBlog) referenced in this morning’s report on a New England road tour, a February 7 blog post of his, Tricking out CoolIris as a Presentation Tool.  In this post, he talks about a keynote he delivered to the Scottsdale Community College, and his desire to “..delve into two trends (he has a) growing interest in” —

..one being YouTube / video as a communication and its evolving culture. I borrowed heavily from the brilliant videos by Michael Wesch (I am convinced I could make an entire presentation just by playing his videos). And the other the rise of DIY culture and media creativity as a past-time.

Levine continued…

In the back of my mind, I had wondered about the capability of using CoolIris (actually pack when it was PicLens) having just seen its lush 3D wall of images you get when viewing a flickr or facebook page. It is very elegant. And I had noticed they’d added support to explore YouTube in the same interface. I saw that you could use arrow keys to move through images sequentially and said, “One day I will do a presentation in this format”.

Now I would have to actually play with this to determine if CoolIris, indeed, enhances the quality of my presentation, or simply dazzles the audience with the motion.  It’s a question I continue to ask myself as I continue to use Prezi.  Thusfar, I rationalize it with the shifts it has forced me to make in the planning of my presentations with more focus on the central idea(s).  The crowd of people coming up after every presentation, asking about that cool presentation software I was using, is not enough to prove its value — or is it?  Shrug!

THEN! Scanning through YouTube, I found this apparent TV show with Kim Cavanaugh and Lee Keller — and yes that’s our Dean Shareski he mentions as the source of these techniques they are demonstrating.  So I’m immediately thinking, this is a Canadian show, especially as the main speaker sports a ponytail.  But then I see the name of the show, Palm Breeze Cafe, and it rings a bell — because those two guys look familar.  I look it up, see the full list of show hosts, and there’s my friend Lee Cobert, of —

Yes!

Palm Spring County Schools.  But when would they have seen Dean Shareski. 

Yes again!

The very same conference I presented at several weeks ago.  I just love these kinds of discoveries. 

No man is an island,

any more,

ever again!

Anyway, this is just something that I initially wanted to write up for a little private blog I have for archiving resources and ideas I’ll want to come back to — but decided to post it here instead.

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I had to try to capture this in the low light of the restaurant.  I ordered the Yellow Fin Tuna, and this is my meal after I sent the fish back to be cooked.  I have to say that, “I’ve never eaten from a ruler before.”

Written a few days ago.

I’m still at the Reaching and Teaching Conference and Calgary.  It has offered an interesting and broad range of ideas, from Larry Lezotte on Thursday, through Ian Jukes yesterday, my thing this morning, and now sitting in Will Richardson’s Web 2.0 presentation.  But just a minute ago, something congealed in my head, related to a bit of tension that’s been with me since Lezotte’s address. Richardson just pulled up his clustr map for his blog, Weblogg-ed — adding that, “The number of dots is not the point.”  With Will’s map, it would be easy the assume that quantity is its value.

But then he said, “This is my classroom.”

It is a thread that runs throughout his presentation, that he learns from his network.  The main thrust of Lezotte’s presentation was that you can’t prepare children for their future in 20th century, factory-designed, brick and mortar schools.  He even talked a bit about school design, and his work with architects, and the constraints that they continue to feel from school boards who are too uncomfortable straying too far from the factory norm.

I’ve written about this before, that we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that you need containers to teach and learn.  It happens within the fixed walls of the classroom, between the covers of our pre-packaged textbooks, and the inflexible confines of the daily schedule.  We even measure learning, to a certain degree, by the amount of time students are contained in their seats.

Yet, the only thing containereque about Will’s map is its visualization.  His teachers connect with him regardless of geography, regardless time, regardless of where they happen to be sitting (home, school, office, coffeeship, cybercafe, etc.).

There is no starting and stopping point.

Well that may not be entirely true.  The starting point is the inception of an idea, its growth, and shaping through the forge of conversation.  The ending point is when it is fully formed and fitted into the engine of another larger idea or concept.

I’m wondering if its possible that the shape of the classroom or even the schedule of the day may not even matter that much, that our task may be to figure out how to morph learning activities so that they flow (or overflow) out into the flexible space of our networks.

Many would say that I’m talking about Project Based Learning (PBL), and in a way I am.  ..and that may be the extent of what I’m thinking about.  But sometimes I wonder if we’ve defined and structured PBL to the point that it, also, might become a container.  I don’t know.  The only thing that I am certain of is that we haven’t come close to exhausting the possibilities of our networks as learning environments, and the continually emerging tools for working those networks.

Contained learners and learning is about control, and formal education that is entirely about control is the antithesis to the knowledge and learning skills our children will need in their future.

Three points to my bottom line:

1. Know that you are a learner — it’s at the heart of being a teacher.
2. Cultivate your own networked classroom and acknowledge that it is perpetually beta.
3. Talk about your network with your students and provoke them to talk about theirs.

I think that if we can do these things, then a less containered learning environment may start to emerge.

Help Me!  There’s WiFi in the Telus Convention Center in Cagary, but it requests an access code.  There’s no one to ask, because I have the only laptop in the entire hall — except for Larry Lezotte, who is sitting on the stage.  I’d go up and ask him, but he looks too comfortable.  I never look comfortable before I have to present.  I can’t even access the web with my phone, because data is switched off — wicked expensive outside the U.S.

OK, things are underway, with short speeches by directors, associate superintendents, etc.  One guy, who just got up and read a very clever digitalesque Dr. Seuss poem, is lamenting that millennials, by the time they are 21, will have watched TV for 11,000 hours, used their cell phones for 9,000 hours (etc.) but only 5,000 hours reading.  Those numbers are not exact, but the impact is the same.

I understand his sentiment, and I am not unsympathetic — and I wish our children were spending more time with extended examinations of large ideas and rich plots by reading.  But they are reading.  It’s just a different kind of reading and with a different goal.  I isn’t schooly style reading — but that doesn’t make it unworthy of our understanding and even respect.

Lezotte gets pretty feisty here about the need to change our schools

Now, we’re welcoming Lawrence Lezotte.  He says that education in Canada and the U.S. is heading toward the perfect storm.  There are three fources that are converging.

1. Rising standards and expectations because of technology and competition
2. More and more children present challenges to teachers for a variety of reasons
3. We’re expected to do all of that with fewer resources (with or without a declining economy)

He says that, “Your school division or district is perfectly aligned to produce the results you are currently getting.  If you’re happy, then no problem.  But you aren’t addressing these converging forces.” (approximate quote)

First we have to frame the problem.  Part of the problem is changing expectations, accountability, and changing clients.  A futurist said that, “Your demographics are your desteny.”  This is true.  Demographics are an enormous influence on our future.  That point was made eloquently by a keynote speaker at NECC a few years ago.  Can’t remember his name.

Bell curve was perfect years ago, because the purpose of school was to sort people out. If we tested ourselves with standard IQ tests and then tested our children, Our children would out perform us by one full standard deviation.

Our clients are changing.  Increasing numbers are poor and economically disadvantaged and minority — especially limited English proficiency.

In order to bring those students up (close the gap), we have to be able to assure 30% more time on task than advantaged students.  He says that the U.S. insists on a sameness standard.  We want to treat everyone the same.  We have to find a way to break out of that.  This hearkens, in my mind, to my recent rant about Duncan’s call for more time in school for students.  I think that the time isn’t the issue, so much as what they are doing — what the “task” is.

He’s making a pretty passion point about treating kids differently based on their performance.  He says that if you look at the percentage of kids with profound handicaps of all types, it has remained constant, about 5%.  But if you look at the students who have been labeled with learning disabilities has increased constantly.  Lezotte, says that it’s because of “accountability.”

He quotes, “Form follows function.”  You design the system to accomplish the function.

Lezotte says, “You will never get J curve results from a a bell curve school.”

Think about having 1/3 of your students to be in tutoring about 1/3 of the time.  What does that look like.  Is that what we need.

He talks about a professor in Florida who says that the closer a school system gets to 100%, the more and more it costs to achieve each additional percentage point.  You reach a point where you need a new paradigm.  Lezotte suggests that the paradigm shift is to move from teacher-centered education to learner-centered education. Bingo!

Battery died shortly after this, as did my attention.  It was 10:30 PM my time.  But I did manage to scratch this into my conference program.

Authority is delegated from the top!
Leadership is delegated from the bottom!

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