Month: January 2006

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the PodcasterCon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was a unique conference, that was totally connected in that all of the attendees where full participants (as bloggers) in the global conversation. Even though one of the presentation rooms had very poor wireless connectivity, the conference seemed to gain in value after it was over, as the conversations continued.

I facilitated a session on podcasting in education. As an opener, I played a clip from Room 208, a podcast from 3rd and 4th graders in Wells, Maine. Their program was about the Wikipedia, and how important it is for people who contribute to the vast open source document, to do so responsibly.

After playing the clip, I asked the audience of k12, higher ed, and non-educators to comment on what they heard. One person said that they thought it was important that the students had a voice to what they were learning. The next person asked, “but is it their voice? It sounds more like an adult wrote it and the students are reading.” We continued on with the conversation, and the entire conference session is available on my podcast at:

• Connect Learning, Episode 51 — Podcastercon 2006

Bob Sprankle, the teacher of room 208, subscribes to my podcast and heard the comment. He then clipped that part of the podcast out, and played it the next day for his students. The class exploded with indignation. Sprankle grabbed his iRiver, and recorded the following discussion in his class, as students began to be flattered that their writing sounded so adult, but assuring that their words were their voice. Sprankle published the discussion on his Bit by Bit podcast, “Podcasts as Continued Conversation” or “David Warlick has our back”

Is this a flat world? Is learning becoming a conversation? Does it mater any more where you are?

[Live blogging! Please forgive misspellings]

I’m sitting in my first virtual conference. I know, I should be old hand at this, but I’m really an old-fashioned sort of guy. Ian Gibson, of Sidney, Australia is currently delivering the keynote address. Because his PowerPoint was too large, he is aiming his camera at his own computer display to project his slides. Using technology is about adapting.

The conference is called the Flat World Conference, and most of the audience is in Kansas. I’m sitting in my basement office here in Raleigh. I’d thought about wearing my bath robe, but opted against it, am wearing a clean shirt, tie, and dirty blue jeans.

Ian is talking about The World is Flat, by Thomas Freedman. The top ten list of flateners

1. Berlin wall falling
2. Netscape goes public
3. Windows 95 with a built in browser
4. Open sourcing
5. Out sourcing
6. Off Shoring
7. Supply Chaining
8. Insourcing
9. Informing
10. The Steroids (digital, mobile, personal, virtual, wireless, and ubiquitous

Einstein said, Imagination is more important than knowledge.

How do we stimulate imagination.

This is a key question for us as educators.

Ian, has just invited participation from his brother in Victoria, Canada, and a friend in Northern Denmark. It is a team of educators, presenting from three continents, and I’m blogging it from Raleigh, NC.

EKS (Elsebeth), from Denmark, is now talking about how these connecting technology affect teaching and learning. She says that learning can become much more collaborative. Her masters degree program is going international, and they feel that it is important to have ways not only to collaborate but to socialize, to be human learners.

It enable learning through dialog (the conversation), and to practice democratic principals. Learning to listen and incorporate. As important is the fact that collaborative learning support reflection.

How technology enables the traditional classroom

1. bring the world into the classroom
2. allow each student to put his hands on the world

Ian says that we should be teaching

1. technological fluency
2. verbal fluency
3. collaboration
4. leadership
5. coordination
6. teamwork
7. interperson skills
8. complex problem solving

All educators need to be part of the change. Not behind it!

If I could think of a more superlative term to describe my experience at yesterday’s K12 Market Symposium, at MacWorld, I would use it. Cheers and applauds go to Mike Lawrence, the executive director of California CUE. He and his staff coordinated the event with MacWorld, the first educator strand in many years. They had so many attendees to register for the symposium that MacWorld had to move us into a larger hall. But what blew me away was the line-up of speakers that Mike brought in.

I started it off with a keynote. Same old thing, I’ve heard it before 😉 Then Hall Davidson, world class keynote speaker, is also a great presenter of nuts and bolts. He was his usually dynamic and very high energy self — very smart and quick. Davidson demonstrated some very basic, but compelling video production techniques. His invention, KitZu, certainly appears to have matured into something that all educators should be aware of and be using.

You go to the web site, select a subject area, and then download a kit labeled with a topic of interest. He picked sharks. After the download, you have a folder with image files, video files, and audio. These files can very easily be dragged and dropped into iMovie or Premiere on the PC, and then sequenced and voiced over to create an original video product. Kits learn, by producing something that teaches. “How cool is that?”

After lunch, I did my standard Podcasting presentation. I have to say that the jet lag had taken hold by that point, and frankly, I don’t remember much of what I said, so I hope I did good. We did record some input from the crowd, and perhaps I’ll have a podcast of that in the coming days or weeks.

That was followed by Carol Anne McGuire, whom I talked about in yesterday’s blog. I wrote during her presentation and posted it during my final session on Blogging as a demonstration. In retrospect, I think that what impressed me the most about Carol Anne’s presentation is that I expected to learn about utilizing features of computers to compensate for her students’ visual handicaps. Instead, it was about how technology made her children special.

Rae Niles told the story in her presentation about a class in one of her schools that was studying handicaps and especially blindness. There were no blind people in their small Kansas town, so the study was purely academic. But Rae knew Carol Anne, and arranged for her students to iChat into the Kansas classroom and to have the students talk together about the challenges of navigating a sighted world, and even some advantages that the blind children described.

Rae Niles, the next speaker, is a master story teller. She is the director of curriculum and technology in a 1:1 school district in Kansas. She says that the most obvious benefits of 1:1 is that attendance is up, Discipline issues are down, and the relationship between students and teachers has changed. But Rae told several stories about specific students who, before they had laptops, had been notable underachievers and a frequent source of disruption in their classrooms. But, when empowered by personal computers, their behaviors changed, their grades went up, and unique talents emerged that no one had seen before.

A few months ago, I podcasted a story that I had heard from an Apple rep at the state educational technology conference in Kansas. The story was about four boys, who interviewed a number of local residents about World War II, learning about the soldier train and how people would bring baked goods and fried chicken to Newton, Kansas, to hand to the soldiers as they rolled by on their way to the war. The four boys changed the focus of their video production in a way that illustrated that what they had learned was special, that they owned what they learned. Well, it happened in one of Rae Niles schools and she told that story yesterday. I certainly wish that I had known and could have recorded her telling. She is a unique talent that I think we’ll all be hearing a lot more of.

After closing the event with my standard blogging presentation, I thought back on the day, again thankful to Mike Lawrence for assembling such a powerful event. …And all I can think about is the tragic waste that we are allowing to happen in this country and world by not empowering all of our children to be their best. We need each other’s best right now, and we can afford to do it. We simply lack the vision and courage among our leaders. Come next November, here in the U.S., look for those characteristics in the people you vote for. We must stop looking backward, and start moving forward.

2¢ worth

OK, no more chocolate cake at 10:00 PM. That aside, I had a wonderful evening last night with some really smart people. Mike Lawrence, the executive director of California’s CUE (Computer Using Educators) invited me to dinner, and we were joined by Hall Davidson and others (Scott Kinney, Coni Rechner, and others) from Discovery Educator Network. We were also joined by Michael somebody Morrison, who is a director of technology for a large school district in Southern California (not OC). And there were others.

We did something very interesting. First of all, the restaurant was Restaurant Lulu, on Folsom Street. If you look at the web page, that cake at the top of the page is why I’m up at this hour. The food was served family style, so we each ordered a dish and it was put in the middle of the table with serving utensils. All of us shared. It was delicious. What was interesting, was that periodically, people would swap seats. I didn’t, because my hearing problems force me to logistically pick my seat so that I can hear the most people around me. I stayed put. But I got to sit by six different people. I guess I haven’t been around the block very many times, because I’ve never seen this before, but it was wonderful to be able to talk with so many people, and learn so much.

I believe that Discovery Educator Network is something to pay attention to. In a time when resources are short (to non-existent), and risk taking is unheard-of, here is a company who has a mission to help people learn, has never paid attention when told, “You can’t do that.” and sincerely wants to help us do our jobs by serving us from the 21st century, not from the 19th. They’re still trying to figure that out, but they are hiring some very smart people to help them engineer something special.

This is a subentry and a bit of a gripe, and I may have griped about this before. But I have to say it again, that I am tired of technology educators, here in the U.S. saying, “Have you heard of the $100 laptop?” “How do we get some of these things?” “I know my PTAs would pay for them.”

The tragedy is that they have every right to be interested and excited. But look! MIT’s $100 laptop was engineered for developing countries, for people who can’t afford a computer. The United States of America is rich. We can afford to give a Toshiba or an iBook to every child, and grandparent. Our problem is not that we’re poor. Our problem is that we’re stingy!

Access to information and communication technologies in a national problem. Assuring that students and their families have access to contemporary information and the skills to use that information is not a problem of your school, or your district, or your state. It’s a national problem that, in my opinion, threatens the security of our future.

2¢ worth — and a whole lot more!