On the last day of NECC, I will be having fun. I’m not taking the day off, but delivering my last presentation, Podcasting. The fact of the matter is that at the deadline for submitting proposals to present at NECC, I hadn’t even heard of podcasting. My first experience was when John Blake, an educator in Whiteville, North Carolina, walked up to me at the NC Educational Technology Conference (December 2004) and thrust his iPod, equipped with a Griffin iTalk in my face and proceeded to interview me. I was dumbfounded, and, to be honest, gave it very little thought until the Winter holidays when I took some time to explore.

By February, I became convinced that podcasting would be a player in the education arena, and sent an e-mail to some NECC contacts offering to do a session, if they currently had no proposals dealing with podcasting. They asked me to submit a proposal, and said they’d work it in if they had cancelations. I don’t know what canceled, but I’ll be talking about and demonstrating podcasting (Step Asside CNN: I’m Listening to my Podcast) at 12:00 PM in room 113A in the Convention Center on Thursday.

A search of the NECC program reveals that this is the only presentation that mentions podcasting, there will likely be a number of seasoned producers in the audience as well as learners. For this reason, I’ve decided to use a wiki for my online handouts and have invited a number of practiced education podcasters to contribute to the handout site. If you are podcasting and would like to examine and perhaps contribute to the handouts before the presentation, please send me an e-mail (david[dot]warlick[at]gmail[dot]com).

Finally, I am planning to regularly record my impressions of the conference and interviewing participants to learn about what they are learning, and how it will impact their work. My plan is to post a daily podcast program on Connect Learning, but this will remain dependent on circumstances.

See you in Philadelphia!

Other Podcast Events at NECC:
iPod, RSS Feeds, & Podcasting in Education (Birds-of-a-Feather) • 4:45PM 6/29
Premiere Podcast Event • 8:45PM 6/28

Just in through from the NECC RSS feed , Apple Distinguished Educator Podcast. Apple, apparently with DMIT (Digital Media Instruction Technologies) at Arizona State University, will be producing a series of Podcasts with Apple Distinguished educators: Barnaby Wasson, of Arizona State University; Ross Kallen, of Poway Unified School District; and Ted Lai, of Los Angeles County Office of Education, during the NECC conference in Philadelphia next week. This is great news, and could provide some acceleration to the developing ideas around using podcasting as a teaching and learning strategy.

It does, however, make me just a little sad. One of the things that most excites me, personally, about podcasting and the other global conversation technologies that it springs from (blogging, rss, information and media aggregation, etc.) is that they have come largely from people, who had an idea, made it work, and put it out there for the rest of us to use. Mostly it has happened without and even in spite of the corporate estate.

I’m glad that Apple will be podcasting NECC. It, through its distinguished educators, will share a perspective that will be truly valuable to all of us. Also pay attention to:

• Steve Dembo, of Teach42
  http://teach42.com/
• Kelly Dumont, of The Educational Mac
  http://theeducationalmac.blogspot.com/
• Tony Vincent, of Learning Handheld
  http://learninginhand.com/blog/
• and myself, David Warlick, Connect Learning
  http://davidwarlick.com/connectlearning/

Also, be reminded of Blogging NECC, educators from across the nation who will be blogging at, about, and with the National Educational Computing Conference.

I’m sitting in the Bradley airport, in Hartford, Connecticut, waiting for my flight home to Raleigh. This will be the end of my traveling until Saturday, when I take off for NECC.

The big discussion last night at the CAIS (Connecticut Association of Independent Schools) Conference was getting teachers to take advantage of professional development opportunities. Most of the attendees at the conference, at least the ones who attended my keynote, were directors of technology.

Admittedly, private schools are something of a new environment for me. I work mostly with public school districts and agencies who serve public schools. I heard more than once, while at the conference, “We don’t worry about No Child Left Behind.” Being private schools, I imagine that there are many things that they do not have to worry about, constraints that face public school teachers every day. At the same time, I suspect that private school curriculum has to be much richer and deeper than is expected in most public schools, leaving little room to retool classroom teaching and learning.

Many of the educators I talked with expressed a sense of heritage at their schools (some of the schools nearly 200 years old) that results in an almost impenetrable barrier to restructuring. We try to sell the value of technology as an educational tool and to convince educators of the need for students to develop technology skills. But it remains a hard sell.

I am convinced that our best avenue is to make a case for the changing information environment, that increasingly the information that we use on a daily basis is digital and networked, and that it has become less a product for consumption, and much more an ongoing and global conversation. If we can convince people of the changing nature of information, and articulate a new model for literacy that addresses the new information environment, then we may be able to retool classrooms by integrating the new literacy into teaching and learning.

This brings me to my fourth day at NECC, delivering a Spotlight Address called Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. This is my most frequent delivered keynote address, and it has two goals.

• To make a case for the changing nature of information, and the urgency that exists for retooling classrooms.
• To build a model for literacy that expands out of the three Rs to define those basic skills that are necessary to being a successful citizen of the twenty-first century.

So, if you’re coming to NECC, I urge you to attend this session and learn what it means to be a reader, processor of information, and communicator in the knowledge age.

The address is scheduled for June 29 at 12:30 PM in Marriott Salon E/F.

9:52 AM

Early morning flight to Hartford for a keynote address tonight for the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools. I really dislike flying in on the same day as my work. So much can happen with airlines. So I flew out of Raleigh at 6:40, landed a little after 8:00, and then a shuttle ride to the hotel, where they don’t have a room for me yet. So I’m sitting in the hotel lobby, logged in to their wireless network. Hey, I’m bogged down at the moment, but not blogged down. Sorry!

Day three of my 2005 NECC experience will be the first day of the general conference, and perhaps my most relaxed day, with only one session. It will be more relaxed, because I will be part of a panel of some really smart people. So I won’t have much to add, with the likes of Andy Carvin (Digital Divide Network), Yvonne-Marie Andres (Global SchoolNet Foundation), Bonnie Bracey (everywhere), Ed Gragert (iEarn), Dennis Harper (Gen www.Y), and Patsy Wang-Iverson (Research for Better Schools). Here is a paragraph out of the session summary:

A decade has now passed since the first pioneering educators began exploring the potential of the World Wide Web in the classroom. Since then, millions of students have participated in Web-based educational activities, from Webquests to competitions like Thinkquest. At the same time, many K-12 educators are still intimidated by the Internet, and the successful integration of Web-based instruction into the curriculum is often the exception and not the rule.

Hope to see you there.

7:37 AM

Browsing through my aggregator and especially on a quick scan of the NECC Blog Dog, it appears that the National Educational Technology Conference has already begun. Tom Hoffman and Will Richardson are already conversing on their panel discussion, by disagreeing on the future of blogging. I just got invited to a new flickr group, NECC, where six pictures have already been posted.

You can go ahead and start reading and/or listening to the Blogging NECC bloggers. Among these esteemed citizen journalists are Steve Dembo of Teach42, Kelly Dumont of The Educational Mac, and Tony Vincent of Handheld Computing.

As for me, I’m up to day two, Monday, June 27. Yesterday (sunday jun26), a number of educators entered my workshop room at Penn Alex School, with some knowledge of HTML. Six hours later, they left as full-fledged coders, ready to make their contributions to the open source community — or at least they know now why they studied algebra 😉

On Monday, I speak at the Technology Coordinator Forum (SIGTC). The topic will be, “Telling the New Story”. Education, in this country, is mired in old stories about the 3Rs, the archaic roles of teachers and students, the positions of desks, and potential employees who can’t read an application form.

Things have changed since the age of manufacturing. The mill town that I grew up in has shrunk from 16 full capacity plants in the 1950s, to none left in 2005. What are the new stories that we need to tell in order to retool our classrooms for a time when intellectual capital generates wealth and success, not muscle? We will explore the old stories, dissecting them into basic components, and discover and invent some new stories, to take back home and begin to weave around our local campfires.

6:08 AM

I recently learned of a local company (Durham, NC) that is offering Podcasting services. Podblaze (http://www.podblaze.com) offers a directory of podcast programs, though it is not yet very rich, and I wouldn’t recommend it, given Podcast Alley, Podcasting News, and Podcast.net.

The service does offer a free listener account, which enables you to, among other things:

• Access and listen to all your favorite podcasts from one page,
• Use a “cool” flash media player — with over 10 different skins,
• Listen to any podcast at your leisure from any computer, and more.

The listener tool is intriguing, though it is little more than an online version of iTunes or Media Player. However, for some people, a web interface may be ideal, especially for roaming teachers who can not take their computers with them.

Podblaze also offers podcasting services for those interested in establishing their own programs. It appears geared explicitly to the corporate community, but I have e-mailed them for additional information that may be useful to educators.

Casey Hales, an educator and 20 year veteran of radio and television, wrote a wonderful blog entry, For What It’s Worth, on 12 June where he offers some valuable constructive criticism of many podcasts out there. Those who are podcasting or planning to start producing podcasts should definitely read and bookmark this article.

His topics include:

• Using music as a bed to the podcast presentation
• The length and appropriateness of intros
• Radio voice (or “Randy Radio”)
• Post-production

Again, this is a must read for all podcasters.

5:00 AM

Over the coming days, I am going to be writing short articles describing the activities that I am scheduled for at the National Educational Technology Conference (NECC) the end of this month. It promises to be an exceptional conference for many reasons. For me, personally, it will be my first experience with downtown Philadelphia. The more I hear about the city, the more excited I am, hoping to take lots of walks to see and experience as much as I can (on a budget).

But my first engagement, so to speak, at NECC will be a pre-conference workshop, Advanced Interactive Web Site Building with PHP (June 26). This will be a day-long, hands-on workshop on programming. PHP is a language that has been popular in Europe and Asia for years (First developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, who is currently working for Yahoo Inc.). In the last couple of years, the language has taken off in the U.S. and is now reported to be running on one third of all domains. PHP, in a sense, is an add-on to HTML in that it can be written in with the HTML code giving a web page and extraordinary amount of interactivity.

PHP has the added advantage that it is a highly efficient and easy to learn language. Lerdorf says, “I really don’t like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.”

This workshop is already full, but I look forward to other opportunities to teach it. As many of you know, I love programming. It’s like playing with legos, only you never run out of those little square, four-post pieces. 😉

6:54 AM

Sorry I haven’t been writing very much. I am in my home county right now (Gaston County, NC) working a district-wide staff development conference. And it is a conference. I haven’t counted the presenters, but their program book is a thick as any state tech conference I’ve attended, with presentations from locals and out-of-staters alike. the topics include differentiated instruction, brain-based research, 21st century literacy, and “making teaching fun”.

I did my contemporary literacy keynote yesterday and have been spending the rest of my time there teaching teachers to build web pages with PiNet, which the district has installed on their web servers.

Can’t Attend NECC? We’ll Blog it For You!
Here’s what SEGA Tech is saying.

Thanks to the kindness of Barbara Hewick, a Web Marketing Manager at ISTE, it looks as though SEGATech and others will be blogging the NECC in Philadelphia. If you’re unable to make to NECC, relax; you can check our blog for news and commentary concerning the conference. Thanks, Barbara!

This could, indeed, be a new kind of NECC, the beginning of something uniquely valuable, as conferences become as much a journalistic sharing beyond time and space, as it is a focal event of smart people getting together and growing their skills and knowledge.

Very cool!

6:55 AM

Will Richardson brought up two incredibly important issues yesterday in The Challenge of Wikipedia.

I’m on a wiki and Wikipedia bender of late, trying to get my brain around all of the implications for educators in terms of how to teach research and the use of sources. I think that this is actually a bigger challenge for elementary school teachers who are in that pre-exposition gray area. For instance, if my daughter gets assigned a “report” on Argentina, why wouldn’t she go first to the Wikipedia entry? The bigger question is why would she go anywhere else? The entry has 4,100 words and about 125 links to more information. It’s got maps and charts and pictures. It’s been edited like a gajillion times, most recently today with updated GDP figures. Ok, I know, I know. It might be all wrong. But you and I know…it’s not.

Many of you have had the experience of demonstrating Wikipedia to a group of teachers, and they become so excited — until you click the “Edit This Page” button. It is no exaggeration to say that they are shocked. If it’s librarians, we wheel in defibrillators.

Richness and extent of accuracy aside, it is understandable that educators feel like their feet have been knocked out from under them by the Wikipedia. We have been taught to assume the authority of the information that we encounter. But today, our information environment is changing into something that is…

less worthy of this assumption
but at the same time
more valuable.

I would make the assignment like this. Look up Argentina on the Wikipedia, and collect the facts and concepts that are appropriate to the assignment. Then prove that those facts and concepts are true, by researching elsewhere for evidence of their accuracy and appropriateness.

We have to stop teaching students to assume authority and teach them to prove it. A big shift in the nature of how we teach!

Will takes us to the next level when he says…

The bigger, bigger question is why should she do that report at all? I know she has to learn how to write, to organize ideas, to use different sources of information etc. And believe me, I want her to do all of those things. But do I want her doing what I did as a kid? (I did Argentina, you know.)

I did a report about Argentina too. I remember nothing about that report, but I do clearly remember the Bola that I made, and demonstrating it’s use to the class. Took us almost 30 minutes to get Skitter Jones free from those things. 😉

Part of learning is expressing what we have learned, and more than that, expressing it in a way that accomplishes something. I do not write reports any more. I haven’t written a report since I was in school. But I do write, and I draw, and manipulate images, and edit sound and video. I produce information products that are designed to affect people in some desired way. Rather than giving students an assignment to write a report, they should write a travel log of Argentina, or make a travel brochure, or a news cast of some even happening in the country. Assignments should reflect the new information environment.