On Tuesday night, I had the pleasure of attending a book reading and signing at one of Raleigh’s independent book stores, Books a Quail Ridge. The author was one of my favorite sci-fi writers, Orson Scott Card. For most, his most prominent work is Ender’s Game and the following series. He has also written a parallel series referred to as the Shadow books.

Instead of reading (parts of his latest work, Magic Street), Card offered to just answer questions, and spent most of the evening talking about Ender’s Game, progress on an up-coming Ender movie, and how he prepared to write a book (Magic Street) that takes place entirely in an African American neighborhood. Card is quite white.

Anyway, I asked the author, who is also a university instructor of creative writing, what we should be doing to help younger children and high school students to become better writers. He graciously gave me permission to include his answer in a podcast. So check out Connect Learning, episode 32, for the audio.

Yesterday, SEGA Tech commented on a post from Laura Turner through THE Journal, called Every Educator Should Possess these 20 Skills. Jeff, the author of the SEGA piece wrote:

know(ing) how to use technology and integrating technology in the classroom are two different things. What do you think?

I agree, Jeff, and I suspect that Laura would agree as well. Knowing how to use the technology only catches us up with our students. Taking the next step, one that is crucial to educating today’s children for their information-driven, technology-rich world, requires us to examine and reflect on how these various technologies affect our information environment. As I’ve said many times, it isn’t the technology that is impacting our lives, it is the information, and we have to come to grips with how the nature of information (shape of knowledge) is changing.

I want to take a few minutes and comment on Laura’s items. And I appoligize to Ms. Turner if it appears that I am taking exception with her very fine list. My intention is to continue her conversation.

1. Word Processing Skills
   OK! What does it mean when anyone with a computer can produce written content with the assistance of word processing software. What does it mean that thousands of people today are making at least part of their income by selling books through the digital bazaars, books that would have had no buyers five years ago, authors with no voice — without the word processor.

2. Spreadsheets Skills
   Math lives on. Kids must learn to add, subtract, count, and measure. The must understand the language of numbers. But are we teaching them to process thousands of numbers. Learning to use a spreadsheet is as critical as learning long division. No, it’s more critical.

3. Database Skills
   Well, I honestly don’t know about this, because I don’t know what database skills are anymore. It was a pretty easy thing to wrap your mind around in the days of Microsoft Works, and the original AppleWorks. But who needs to know how to use Access? Not me. I do agree that people need to know how databases work in order to access databased digital resources. Students need to understand that the value of information increases when it is organized.

4. Electronic Presentation Skills
   The key word here is presentation. As we become increasingly dependent on information, communication becomes an increasingly dependable skill. We acknowledge that a communication’s success depends, to a great degree, on the format of the information — the media. Students must learn to communicate with images, sound, animation, and video, at the same time that we are teaching them to write.

5. Web Navigation Skills
   Information is a web today. Alphabetical orders no long rule how we organize information. It is the logical connections that form themselves into webs. It means that the answering of a basic question now requires an entire aray of higher-order thinking skills. Look to the exceptional work of Donald Leu and his team at The Literacy Web.

6. Web Site Design Skills
   I would expand this to all information design. What we are learning about how information presents itself online, should be transfered to print as well. There are some basic rules for information design. But the bottom line is to present information in order to accomplish your goals.

7. E-Mail Management Skills
   This is a good one. I would also include IM and teleconferencing content.

8. Digital Cameras
   It is important to understand that cameras stopped being just cameras when they became digital. Think of a digital camera as an input device, a machine that assists us in collecting information (visual) in then importing that information into a computer where we can add value to it.

9. Computer Network Knowledge Applicable to your School System
   OK, I suspect that there is something that needs to be known about networks. But networks will increasingly pass into the background as they become increasingly ubiquitous.

10. File Management & Windows Explorer Skills
    Basically, we run our own digital libraries now. It’s our file structures. It is also our bookmarks, our RSS aggregators, and much more. We have much to learn from librarians.

11. Downloading Software From the Web (Knowledge including eBooks)
    I do it all the time. Unfortunately, few schools allow it, for very good reason. It is part of keeping up and continuing to make our devices more useful as problem-solving, goal-achieving tools.

12. Installing Computer Software onto a Computer System
    Ask any 4th grader. 😉

13. WebCT or Blackboard Teaching Skills
    It doesn’t stop here. We have the ability to create digital content environments today and to invite people with similar interests in to study, discuss, solve problems, create products, or just to play.

14. Videoconferencing skills
    A biggy. Presenting in front of a camera is different from presenting in front of an audience. I can vouch for that. It requires a different set of gestures, a different frame of voice, a different point of focus. I need some lessons here.

15. Computer-Related Storage Devices (Knowledge: disks, CDs, USB drives, zip disks, DVDs, etc.)
    All this as well as the next big thing. Hey, what happens when there is so much storage capacity that we don’t need networks any more. Think about it. Have you seen Safari Montage from Library Video Company?

16. Scanner Knowledge
    Like digital cameras, it’s an input device. Capture information so that you can add value to it.

17. Knowledge of PDAs
    As important as understand PDA is understand what the increased ubiquity of what is essentially superhuman intellegence mean to what, how, and why we teach.

18. Deep Web Knowledge
    I’ve heard this referred to as the invisible web, though that is apparently an incorrect label. This relates back to using webs of information and knowing how to talk to a database.

19. Educational Copyright Knowledge
    Hey, we’re all going to be information property owners. Ask your students to copyright (Copyright (c) by Johnny Anderson 2005) their work. Better yet, look into Creative Commons license.

20. Computer Security Knowledge
    (See below)

What I see that’s missing? Obviously: blogging, Wikis, RSS, and aggregators, although they could be integrated into items that Laura did list.

The big obvious is ethics. Here last item, computer security, is critical. But what are we as educators doing to try to eliminate the need for security? Ethics and information, needs to be integrated into the curriculum.

I suspect that all 20 of Ms. Turner’s items could fit into one or more of four skills:

1. Selecting and Accessing digital information.
2. Processing digital information.
3. Producing and communicating digital information.
4. Ethical practices in using digital information.

Please do read Laura’s article. There is a wealth of content there as well as many valuable web links.

7:11 AM

For those readers outside of the U.S., on this day, we celebrate the signing of our Declaration of Independence. With this act, a few courageous men set this country on a path toward freedom from monarchy, and an experiment in self governance and an economy based on working to achieve our enlightened self interests.

I am not going to talk about my country’s glorious successes, of which there are many. That will be done by others today, more eloquently than I could. They will talk, in their speeches, about heros. They will speak about the deserving heros of war, those who have made the supreme sacrifice and especially those men and women who risk their health and their lives today protecting not only our freedom but the freedom of others.

In this space, I want to make a statement about those men and women who will not be mentioned in today’s city-part speeches, people who work day after day, in thankless jobs, assuring that this country succeeds — people who are equally responsible for the greatness of this country. Most do not risk their physical well-being, but they do spend their days, months, and years in jobs that are not exciting, working for significantly less pay than their corporate counterparts, with little or no opportunities for monetary advancement. But they work, none the less, to make sure that this country succeeds for its people and the dreams that our forefathers inspired. It is hard work, and men and women do that work every day.

So if you know a government bureaucrat, thank that person today for their daily efforts in making sure that roads are built and maintained, that we are protected from the occasional greed that can risk our health, and to assure that all U.S. citizens have the opportunities to achieve their dreams. If you know a police officer or fire fighter, thank that person for their work and their risks in keeping us safe. If you know a school teacher, thank that person today for their work and their creativity in helping our children to be prepared for tomorrow’s challenges.

And if you hear someone talking disparagingly about government and government workers, if you hear people complaining about how there taxes are too high, and criticize people who seek to invest in our country’s future, do not thank them. Because they are not patriots.

Last night, Gordon Dahlby posted the following message to the WWWEDU list. This is candy for me, and I am posting my response to the weblog.

On Jul 2, 2005, at 6:28 PM, Gordon Dahlby wrote:

What would a wikipedia type textbook look like? Such as, what would we need to create a wikipedia-type 1-9th grade math textbook series or social studies, or fill-in-the blank subject?

What is it from a “textbook” that attracts teachers and schools to purchase this.

Wikitextbooks would be perpetually added to by teachers, curriculum directors, student teachers, graduate and undergraduate students, SME (subject matter experts), and, perhaps, students, and perhaps the business world.

What does the group think?¹

I suspect that this is the way that we are going, though we will need something richer than most wiki engines that exist today. I would probably put students on top though, making the textbook more of a personal digital textbook, rather than a class publication. The teacher’s contribution would be more akin to today’s powerpoint presentations, though MUCH richer. The teacher would present or provide a multimedia information product and students would pick and choose, and mix and re-mix that and other content and media to enrich their own digital textbooks. It would be part eportfolio and part digital library.

Also, don’t leave out the publishers. They would produce effectively packaged content and sell it piece-meal, each student or teacher receiving an allowance for fee-based media to be include in their resources.

The bottom line is that education would be a combination of goals-based and standards-based expectations (though we would rescue the standards from the government [amateurs] and put it back in the hands of professional educators). Students would be told, “after this unit, you must be able to do these things, or you must know these things and be able to do this with them.” Students, with the ongoing consultative assistance of teachers and others, would work to achieve the goals, constructing a growing personal digital library in the process. And, of course, they would have access to their digital library while taking their tests (except for the most basic/fundamental skills).

At NECC, I started using MediaWiki for my online handouts. I found an extension, developed by two German engineers, that displays RSS feeds, so that blog articles written about the sessions would appear within the handouts. Also, for the podcasting presentation on Thursday, veteran podcasters Jeff Moore, Bud Hunt, Steve Dembo, and Eric Jefcoat contributed content about how they produce their programs.

2¢ worth!

¹Dahlby, Gordon. “Curiosity on wikitextbooks.” Online posting. 2 Jul 2005. WWWEDU. 03 Jul 2005. <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwwedu/message/7069>.

Home from the NECC and doing more resting yesterday and today than anything else. I spent much of yesterday afternoon at the Apple Store in Durham getting the Ethernet port on my Mac fixed and having Brenda’s iBook serviced. My son and I scanned through NECC blog entries while waiting at the store and we picked out a digital video camera for him to spend his summer music-making money on.

I suppose this is the best moment for NECC reflections. A tiny bit of time is seperating me from the event (including a three-hour delay at the Philly airport and abismal baggage service here in Raleigh from a U.S. Airline). But there’s not so much distance that I’ve forgotten the ambiance of the conference, something that I hope I will richly remember for a long time.

It was a GREAT conference and the staff was flawless — always friendly and eager to help with hospitality that compared with that of my region of the country. No “Ya’lls”, but lots of very friendly help. The only problems that I had were with tech issues and tech support, but sometimes this can’t be helped.

On reflection, it appears to me that NECC 2004 (New Orleans) was “The Year of the Blog”. Last week’s NECC (Philadelphia) was “The Year of the Blogger.” With weblog articles going out almost hourly and podcasters riddling sessions and exhibitors, this conference became, as Weinberger said, “A conversation!”

The question on my mind is, “To what degree is this new conversation going to change the nature of conferences?” We attend, listen, and learn, move around, and listen, and learn some more. We network, we make contacts, communicate, and move along. Last week, however, our communications began to transcend the walls and halls of the conference center. Add to that the fact that these conversations are being automatically aggregated by services like Technorati (http://technorati.com) and by clever hacks from tech-savvy attendees and presenters — aggregated into logically organized digital libraries of insight. Does this change the nature of the conference experience?

My online handouts were all built with wikis. For my podcasting session, four other prominent podcasters (Jeff Moore, Bud Hunt, Steve Dembo, & Eric Jefcoat) contributed to the handouts just before the conference began from their widely varied geographic locations. Both the “Redefining Literacy…” and the podcasting session pages included built in aggregators that list subsequent blog articles that mention certain key words, tying the conversation into the context of the presentations.

My burning question now, “Have we reached a point where robust wireless Internet in the presenation halls has become just as essential as the LCD projector?” We’ve become accustomed to multimedia teaching and learning. For NECC 2006 (San Diego), will facilitating multicasting be just as essential?

My 2¢ Worth!

It’s morning, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading yesterday’s USA Today (compliments of Holiday Inn Express). I’m intrigued by the story of a human built space craft crashing into a comet.

On Monday at 1:52 a.m. ET, a probe deployed by a NASA spacecraft 83 million miles from home will smash at 23,000 mph into an ancient comet the size of Manhattan, blasting a hole perhaps 14 stories deep.

Launched in January, NASA’s $333 million Deep Impact mission is designed to answer questions that scientists have long had about comets, the ominous icebergs of space.¹

Cool stuff!

It also intrigues me that it’s just another story. I’m old enough (here he goes again) that I remember, not only when Neil Armstrong step onto the moon, but also when Alan Shepherd was launched into space. I remember Sputnik, and I remember how the world held its breath for just a moment with each one of these events. Now, we are exploring the Solar System, and beyond, and it’s like it is happening in the next town over, and deserves little more attention.

OK, we’re here at the National Educational Computing Conference, where tech-saavy, forward-looking educators from across the country and around the world are talking about the future of education. Yet, the only place I’ve heard tell of this extraterrestrial event is in the newspaper outside my hotel room door.

OK, we’re busy worrying about more important things, like the fact that the U.S. federal government is willing to pay more to build that small space craft than it is willing to spend on contemporary technologies for its children’s classrooms, a budget that president bush proposes be slashed to $0.

As budget talks continue on Capitol Hill, advocates of educational technology are praising a spending plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee on June 16, which would restore more than $300 million in funding for the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) block-grant program and provide additional spending for a handful of other initiatives President Bush had asked Congress to cut in 2006.²

Yes! We have more important things to worry about!

---

¹ Vergano, Dan. “Science meets a comet head-on.” USA Today 29 Jun 2005. 30 Jun 2005 <http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-06-28-deep-impact-cover_x.htm>

² Murray, Corey. “House would restore $300M for ed tech.” eSchool News 17 Jun 2005 . 30 Jun 2005 <http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=5732>

7:15 AM

Today, I’ll be delivering my Redefining Literacy… spotlight session. I do want to make note that this presentation is largely the same one I did last year. There will be some additions, but basically, the message is the same — and absolutely to no degree less important. We must rethink what it means to be literate, and then integrate that into the curriculum.

All of that said, if you’ve seen the presentation before at NECC or some other conference, then use your time more productively and attend another presentation.

Also, in my efforts to make my online handouts more useful to audiences, I have added a feature that will link blog articles about the presentation to the handouts. Therefore, if you will be sharing your insights about these ideas with the world of blog readers, please place the abbreviation, “rdl” (for ReDefining Literacy) in the text or title. It is also a good idea to register you blog with Technorati (http://technorati.com), in order to expedite its inclusion in my handouts.

I hope to see you there!

6:03 AM

Last night will go down as a high point in 2005 NECC. First of all, I went to the Technology & Learning Reception, celebrating their 25 years in service to educators. It was outstanding fun visiting with old friends and making some new ones. I’d planned to also visit at least one other reception, but fatigue and lack of time prevented it. I did make it to the student film festival, which, as anticipated, knocked my socks off. They were all not surprisingly good, and a few were professional quality in the production and imagination. I’m convinced that kids look at video information in ways that I don’t. They see nuances in how information is delivered, and leverage them in their own productions. I was more than impressed.

As the showcase was ending, Andy Carvin ran up to me and Clint Kennedy, saying that there was a long line at the door to the Podcasting party that Apple was putting on. To be honest, I was expecting a birds of a feather type session with 15 or 20 geeks talking about how the generated their RSS feeds. The line was long and thick, awaiting the gates’ opening for a rock concert. We got in line and performed a dueling podcast.

They got half of us into the room and decided to do two parties so that everyone who came could have the podcast experience. Apple’s presentation was quite good. They presented the podcast concept very clearly — impressively clearly. Although podcasting is quite simple, the vocabulary and the exceptions can make it confusing to someone who is learning from scratch. Andy Carvin did catch them on one, very important, exception, and the speaker acknowledged the omission. Still, the point was to portray podcasting as a communication avenue that is simple — made infinitely more simple by iTunes 4.9. “Yaaaaaay!”

Now, Apple is at NECC to make a living, as am I. So I blame them for nothing about their presentation. But during my session tomorrow, Step Aside, CNN! I’m Listening to My Podcasts [12:00PM, PACC 113A], I will acknowledge the real pioneers of education podcasting, and many of them will be in the room.

I must confess some skepticism about podcasting’s hype. It’s part of being more than a half-century old. Most of the people I talked with in line, did not know what podcasting was. It is a buzz. It is the new “thing”. It does have enormous potential, but not as the new technology to integrate into the classroom. Its potential is in helping students learn to communicate richly and compellingly. Its potential is in bringing rich and appropriate content into the classroom that plugs into learning styles that textbooks just don’t hit. It’s not about technology. It’s about the “new shape of knowledge” — the changing nature of information.

5:20 PM

For those of you interested in further exploring the educational implications of “knowledge as conversation” and other aspects of Dave Weinberger’s book (with Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls), The Cluetrain Manifest, John Pederson is organizing a summer online book study. Here is his announcement e-mail which came across on June 11, 2005.

This quote came across my aggregator a few minutes ago.

“Knowledge is literally a matter of conversation. It’s disagreement with people who stretch you. Knowledge is the continuing conversation, not the result of it.”

David Weinberger – The Natural Shape of Knowledge (Last Night’s Keynote [6/10/2005] at the Reboot 7.0 Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark)

This gets at the core of throwing a “Cluetrain + Education” online book study. It’s about a conversation. A conversation intended to stretch our thinking about the role of this new technology in education.

A few “administrative” tidbits.

1) If you plan on ordering a copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto, I suggest you hop on it soon. $5.00 through Amazon.com. The entire text is available online as well.

2) The “study” officially starts on June 27th. Forward this message to your friends, colleagues, or complete strangers. http://pedersondesigns.com/moodle/login/index.php is where they can register.

3) I just assigned everybody with “Facilitator” access. This gives you the chance to kick the tires in Moodle a bit. This course is 1) a conversation, 2) about a book, 3) using tools. I’m not the only one to a) facilitating online conversation, b) deconstruct the contents of the book, therefore, why not give everybody access to manipulate c) the tools. :O) I setup a “Sandbox” area for people to build their castles, then destroy them. If you build a very good one, please feel free to move it out of the sandbox. If you have new ideas, share them!!! The real power of this experience will be what people add to it.

Be good.

:: John Pederson

5:04 PM

[Warning: This is a conference session blog, so please forgive grammar and punctuation mistakes.]

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Intel Breakfast this morning and got to finally listen to Mike Hall, of the Georgia State Department of Education. It seems like Georgia is doing some interesting and bold things, which doesn’t surprise me with Hall at the helm.

The talk was very good, with much that I knew, much that I didn’t, and lots of new perspective.

I also attended a session done by Susi Munshi and Susan Switzer about Chicago Public Schools’ use of blogging. The presentation was good, though a bit basic for me. I’m sure that most of the audience was thrilled. I must say that I’d thought that they were going to go through the process of setting up a blog, but I probably misread the the description. They shared enough that was new to me to make the hour very well worth it.

One idea that really stuck was related to book reviews. We’ve all thought of having students write book reviews on the books that they read and then having them available for future readers. But they suggested asking students to journal as they read the book, pretending to be one of the characters. As they say, “How cool is that”.

I spent about the next two hours in the vendor’s section, podcasting most of the time, so that information will be available on my podcast page (http://connectlearning.davidwarlick.com/) very soon.