EduBloggerCon Questions

I will be presenting at T&L‘s TechForum later this week in Orlando.  It will be their first EduBloggerCon session, which will essentially be an open conversation among educators in attendance about issues related to blogging in education and other Web 2.0 applications.  The session will follow a modified (and drastically compressed) unconference format where a wiki will substitute for the post-its.

Steve Hargadon has set up a Wikispaces site for EduBloggerCons (many more coming), and there is a page there for starter questions.  If you have time, please re-visit this page, scan through the questions, and any of them that seem especially important, please edit the page adding an asterisk (*) to the end of that question.  If there are other essential questions that occur to you, please add them in.

In Orlando, the questions will be wide open — the attendees will be in control.  We are going to do what we can to share the outcomes of the conversation through the web, and perhaps even through a podcast.  However, as always, this will depend on the kindness of the spirits of technology.

SLA in EduTopia

http://davidwarlick.com/images/sla_edutopia.jpgI got my April/May issue of edutopia yesterday and was thrilled to find an article about Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, our friend, Chris Lehmann’s school.  It’s actually an amazing article that speaks very little about technology, and much more about trying to grow a new kind of environment for teaching and learning.  In it, Chris says,

When I hear people say it’s our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me.  Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens.  We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents — compassionate, engaged people.  We’re not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school.  We’re reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate.

You can read the entire article at on its online shelf.

What I like about edutopia is that it seems to be celebrating, and as a result, lifting teacher culture.  It seems to be saying, out loud, that a teacher is a pretty cool thing to be.


Starting to Get It?

There’s a conversation going on at Classroom 2.0, that was started by nlowell and picked up on by several other Ning members.  Cary Harrod’s comments got me to thinking more about social networks.,

I am fairly new to the world of web 2.0 and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the whole idea of transparency. I still haven’t figured out how I could possibly contribute anything new to the conversations taking place right now, particularly in the company of such people as Will Richardson, Terry Friedman, David Jakes and yes, nlowell. What WILL encourage me to enter the web 2.0 conversations are people like Steve, Barbara and Alja who obviously understand the complexities of adult learning.

I’ve written about not getting this SN thing. But reading your ideas made me realize that what I do is entirely about social networks. I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the  gravitational pull of logic.

I looked for a pictures of planets in the Creative Commons sections of Flickr, but found this one by Ollie Deakin — even better!

Attention is one of those words that is talked about a lot in conversations about Web 2.0 — the BIG deuce. In a sense it is a commodity. To get things done, we need other people, and to get them interested, we need their attention. One thing that’s concerned me is that as we talk about limitless bandwidth, limitless channels on the TV, limitless this and that in the world of information, what is not limitless is attention. There are only so many people and so many hours in the day. And each of us are only willing to give up so much of our day’s attention to others’ ideas.

I think that the reason that I don’t get things like Ning is that I started blogging in a time when there was an abundance of attention out there, looking for something to pay attention to, and they would latch on to almost anything. As more people started becoming interested in blogs, and there were only a handful of educator bloggers out there, they came to Will Richardson, Terry Freedman, David Jakes, and some even came to read my blog. It was like physics — attention gathering around Will’s voice built up mass, and the more mass gathering around a particular voice the greater the gravitational pull — and the more attention that was attracted to it.

There isn’t so much attention left, so newer bloggers have more difficulty attracting attention and building up mass. This may be where social networking services like Ning come to play. Within this Classroom 2.0 network, there can be a concentration of attention, such that what a newer blogger (participant/contributor in the conversational web) has to say can be heard and can spark conversation. The network builds up mass where it has become more difficult for individuals. Will doesn’t need a Ning, because he is huge. He is a planet Jupiter. I have a goodly amount of mass, though I’m a mercury, or perhaps more appropriately, one of the moons of Saturn (I love that planet).

Yet Will, and Jakes, and Freedman are also a part of Ning, because their ideas can be latched to from Ning, and spread, and Will can aggregate the conversations that spring up here and talk about them.

So I suspect that Steve Hargadon got it all along.  It is a place for beginners, but for reasons far more esoteric and potent than just having an easier tool.  It’s a place of more concentrated attention and more potency of ideas.

Or I could be entirely off my rocker!


Image Citation:
Deakin, Ollie. “Planet.” Odeaks’ Photostream. 3 Jan 2007. 7 Apr 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/bigdeaks/343935290/>.

Story…

I got this through edhocracy writer and proud new papa, Jeremiah Patterson.  It’s a video by alexitin, who appears to be something of an artist.  What strikes me about the video is that there is a story in side of all of this, a very personal story. 

It also strikes me that the story comes almost equally from the pictures, from his voice, and from the music.  Music is easy.  Voice is easy,  Pictures are easy.  Story is hard!

What do you think?


Visions of School 2.0

Several days ago, Christian Long, President and CEO of DesignShare and think:lab blogger, sent a set of questions to a number of education thinkers, in preperation for a keynote address he will be delivering to school planners and architects.  I got a copy of his questions too, and spent some time yesterday evening jotting down some answers.  Actually, I took a good deal of time answering them, so I thought I’d post them here as well.  I am whittling down his original questions to save space.  I hope that it does not diminish to flow too much.

  • Big Picture trends in the next 5-25 years that will have the biggest impact on what it means to be an engaged learner.  This is the firecracker side of things…

It is impossible and I would be foolish to predict the future.  Today, however, nearly half of the wage-earners in my immediate neighborhood are self-employed, most of us working out of our houses. We are consultants, freelance writers, and one plumber.  The work experience is changing dramatically.   For me, what I do on a daily basis to serve clients and others and to earn income has been almost constantly changing for the 10+ years since I left the state DoE.  Only thirty years ago, when I first started teaching (before PCs), I had no reason to suspect that what I did on the job would change in any substantial way for the next 30 years.

In a time of rapid change, success does not come so much from what you have been taught. It comes from what you can learn, what you can do with what you have learned, and how compellingly you can express it. It will be based on how innovative and resourceful you can be, how well you can not only work in collaboration, but how well you can form collaborative networks, cultivate them, and manage them to accomplish goals. It will require a proficiency with technology but more importantly the ability to play technology like an evolving musical instrument, with which you must continually play new tunes for new audiences.

Success will come from smart and confident people who work like they play, and play like they work.

  • YOUR definition of School 2.0 and/or Classroom 2.0…and how to help “school design” decision makers use it to inform their thinking, research, leadership, and solutions.

My vision of school/classroom 2.0 is, more than anything else, about conversations.  Traditional schools involved teachers and textbooks delivering information to students, and students reflecting that information back.  To better serve their future, today’s classrooms should facilitate teaching and learning as a conversation — two-way conversations between teachers and learners, conversations between learners and other learners, conversations among teachers, and new conversations between the classroom and the home and between the school and its community. 

It is about textbooks (whatever they come to look like) that are channels for these conversations, walls that serve as mirrors as well as windows, and where the very air is a conductor of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, all constructed and communicated through unimpeded conversations.

  • Best way to describe how ‘kids’ (all ages, really, but I’ll use the cute version since most still default to it) are transforming as collaborators, creators, project team members, publishers, etc. …
The traditional classroom operated around anchors.  Desks anchored students, and the front of the classroom anchored the teacher.  Textbooks anchored the content, and the walls anchored the relics of what was learned and what was to be learned.  Grades anchored our children’s attention and teaching the same thing the same way year after year anchored our definition of what it was to be a teacher.

Today’s children, the Millennials, enjoy and flourish in an information landscape that would have been unimaginable when most of us were in school, and it dwarfs, by comparison. the experiences they have in their classrooms.  Their information experience puts them in control, gives them information that becomes a raw material for new information experiences.  It connects them to wings instead of anchors.

  • A challenge or provocative statement that will spark conversation.

The education that we received was defined by limits.  Its rules and roles were confined to what could happen inside the four walls of a classroom and the two covers of a text book.

The education that our children and our future deserve, must be defined by its lack of limits.

  • Offer a set of requests you’d make TODAY that can have a positive impact for learners and teaching guides/mentors without spending a fortune, and set up a mind-shift for bigger school design’ investments in the future. 

I want wheels for every piece of furniture.  I want not one, but two ceiling mounted projectors with smartboards, one driven by a classroom computer, and one driven by my tablet PC, and all connections are wireless. 

I do not want to ever worry about bandwidth, nor do I want to worry about filters (I control the filters). 

The textbooks are outside the window of my classroom, in a pile, in the school yard, waiting to be picked up by city sanitation.  The textbook I use is a dynamic digital collection of resources that may be a wiki or it may be a course management system.  It is probably a combination of the two, and my students help to write and maintain it.  Each student has a computer (laptop or tablet), with the ability to project their displays through one of the projectors.

There’s a water cooler, plants (in rolling planters), and an arbor outside the window, and in my mind and the minds of my students, my classroom is more like a global trolley car, in which we can visit places all over the world and visit any time that has been sufficiently documented.

Great luck to you, Christian!

Maybe I don’t get it, but U of Michigan does…

I was talking with Laura Gallagher, of Inspiration, this morning and she mentioned that the University of Michigan is now offering a program in Social Networking.  So I did a Google News search and found this article from Campus Technology.

U Michigan Unveils Master’s Degree in ‘Social Computing’:

The University of Michigan’s School of Information (SI) announced a graduate-degree specialization in “social computing” through a Master of Science in Information. The university said the program is the first in the country to focus on social computing, the term describing the wave of open technologies that enable masses of people to interact and exchange and sort information.

The program is a specialization under their Master of Science in Information degree.  UMich’s description starts with…

Social computing, including online communities, social networking, and user contributed content, has been the darling of Silicon Valley for the past several years. It has also gained currency in library circles, as venues such as library Web sites incorporate blogging features and sites such as LibraryThing bring recommender technologies to personal book collections.

Seeing Wonder

It had been a long day of meetings and classroom visits.  My work was ending, and I was looking forward to some reflection with my colleagues.  My last visitation was with a first grade computer class, and it had been indicated that we should be our own judges on what classes we would visit and how long we would stay. 

I’d nearly decided to skip the 1st grade computer class.  Primary grades applications of technology have never deeply concerned me.  I have to make decisions on what I’m going to pay limited attention to and I’ve never taught primary grades, their chairs hurt my back — and — well — I just don’t like to be hugged around my knees.

Still I decided to walk in on the class, which had already begun.  The only available chair was on the far side of the room and as I walked across, dozens of doe eyes starred up at me in giant question marks, their brains flashing, “Stranger Alert! Stranger Alert!”  I sat down, and the lesson continued. 

Beth Hunter, their teacher and chair of the computer science department, was walking the students through a short Logo program that instructed the Turtle to make a slinky.  As she finished the description, without actually running the program, she let the students turn around to their computers and start typing their programs in.  It was fun to watch, and I was impressed with their diligence.  I didn’t stand up and walk around.  I wanted to keep my distance.  Plus, standing up from that chair which seemed only three-inches from the floor, would have taken way too much effort. 

Then Ms. Hunter said, “Now, click here to see your Turtle run!”

The class then said, in seemingly practiced unison, “Woe!”  Moments later, various stragglers said in less unison, “Woe!   Woe!         Woe!”

Beth asked them to turn again, and started to re-explain the program, based on her students having seen the effect, saying, “Now we typed, ‘To CIR’…”

and suddenly a small boy raised his hand with a blur of motion, jumped up out of his chair, and said, “Mz Hunter? Mz Hunter?”

Beth stopped and called on the boy, who then asked, “Does it have to be CIR?  Can we teach the Turtle any word?”

“Yes, it can be any word…”

I can’t say that the boy glowed, but the effect was the same. 

I have never seen “wonder” displayed so effectively or so movingly
than what I saw in that little boy’s face. 

I saw a brain running away with possibilities! 
I saw a future of potentials blossom before his life! 

I saw in his eyes,
the clarity of something new and wondrous,
learned and engaged,
and probably to remain a useful nugget of knowledge for the rest of his life,
and lives that he influences in his future.

It’s why we teach!


Image Citation:
Dozo, C.. “Cdozo’s Photostream.” G Raises His Hand to Ask a Question. 29 Mar 2006. 4 Apr 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/cdozo/119694298/>.

More About Computer Applications

I realize now, that I worded the question in the survey very poorly.  Asking questions is an art, and sometimes you don’t know what you’ve really asked, until you start getting answers.  The correct answer, of course, is a combination.  As Christy said,

Christy Tucker said, April 3, 2007 @ 9:49 am
The crux of my argument is that we should teach it as a separate class AND integrate it into the curriculum, rather than treating it as an either/or proposition.

I was actually looking for some opinions about expecting students to learn it themselves, but as Alfred said,

Alfred Thompson said, April 3, 2007 @ 10:02 am
Kids learn some of these applications on their own but seldom learn enough of them. For example they often set page numbers and page breaks manually which defeats much of the advantage word processing software brings. So at some level they need someone to teach them some of the non obvious features.

This is a very good point, but I would suspect that eventually, they would learn the more advanced features in much the same way that many of us did, by starting to ask, “What else can this thing do?”  I continue to think about how they learn to play World of Warcraft and The SIMS, and I suspect that much of it is from each other.  Can we institute opportunities in our schools where they can learn more from each other?  Teaching it, in a traditional sense, costs so much overhead.

Rob Rogers describes what I suspect would be the ideal,

Rob Rogers said, April 3, 2007 @ 7:13 am
5 Years ago we were teaching 10 sections of Computer Applications at the high school, just like you mention above. Now, we have fully integrated it into middle school subject areas. The result, I now have 2 sections only.

At this time, these skills and applications are best taught within a discipline. What better way to reinforce the skills than with content that those application skills enhance or fit.

My nagging question continues to be, are all classroom teachers ready or inclined to teach word processing and spreadsheets at the same time they are responsible for teaching reading, math, social studies, or science?  Is it fair to them to ask it?

I guess that the more that I engage in these conversations through the web and face-to-face, the more I’m realizing how much the idea of self-teaching is influencing my responses, that “the best thing we can be teaching our children today, is how to teach themselves.”

Floyd Geasland commented that many students still do not have convenient access to technology outside the classroom and others echoed this situation.  But I can’t help but believe that the longer we except this as a problem, the longer it will be one.  I think that we have to be real, but we also need to come to expect that learners in this day and time, should have at-hand access to contemporary information technologies.  It’s a huge community/national/world problem that needs to be solved.  But it won’t until we start to expect it!

I like where Patrick went with this conversation,

Patrick said, April 3, 2007 @ 7:31 am
Speaking from a personal standpoint, I would like to see a computer applications class taught, but not from a Microsoft Office standpoint. …Why not use the Comp Apps class to introduce the students to some of the great data mashups out there, or some of the online office suites that this generation might see in their work experiences? Instead of doing away with it, we should use it as a vehicle for change, to teach problem solving skills as the pertain to choosing the best application for a specific endeavor. In this era of unknown problems and uncertain solutions, demonstrating how to find the right app will be a useful skill.

There is so much that is going on right now, that is growing, and coming to define our future, that isn’t getting taught (or learned).  Many kids are using Web 2.0 applications, but I do not believe that they understand it.  They don’t know why it is important and what it means.  It needs to be part of their classroom conversations.

Back to the beginning, I think that most of our students, today, are capable of teaching themselves what they need to know, when it comes to using technology, especially when they can learn it together.  Frequently, when they are engaged in their outside-the-classroom information experience, they are practicing what John Finch called, and Kathy Schrock echoed as “Just in time, just enough” learning.

John Finch said, April 3, 2007 @ 10:38 am
Like anything, “just in time, just enough” is the way that people should learn software applications and this learning should be done in context. When we learn to drive, the most important thing is the driving! We familiarize ourselves with signs and rules as we watch others drive but we have to actually get behind the wheel to learn to DRIVE.

Kathy Schrock echos, April 3, 2007 @ 5:49 pm
I truly believe technology can only be taught in the context of something meaningful and I love John Finch’s quote above “Like anything, “just in time, just enough” is the way that people should learn software applications and this learning should be done in context.”

My bottom line, we need to assure that our children have the basic information (literacy) skills, which include the abilities to use technologies necessary to find, evaluate, work, and compellingly express information in order to accomplish meaningful goals.  Some of it needs to be taught.  But anything that we can facilitate their teaching to themselves, we should do.

Finally, I have to repost Jennifer Wagners comment, because it deserves it.

Jennifer Wagner said, April 3, 2007 @ 9:23 am
My students learned to how to use Excel by having an introductory game of Battleship. That is how they learned cells and columns. We all had fun — and we learned.

My students learned how to rewrite a fairy tale by using the thesaurus tool in Word. And my students created their own business plans — presented powerpoints, budgets, webpages, spreadsheets, and more — and then we had 3 “venture capitalists” come in to hear the presentations and awarded $$$ (ie — scores) based on their belief of the business.

My students created parks in roller coaster tycoon (or zoo tycoon) and keep spreadsheets to track their company assets.

My students word documented their experiences in Oregon Trail, their days in Logical Journey, and they used a spreadsheet to keep track of their missions in Carmen San Diego.

The funny thing — I really don’t ever remember saying “Open (gill in the name of a Office program) and we are going to learn how to….blah blah blah. The program was only a means to the end………

Even now — with the Great Egg Roll 2007 going on — using Excel is not the main objective. Entering data to be analyzed later is.

Grins — I am not sure I am really answering your question — but it did make me think of how I used programs.

:

What about Computer Applications

I am currently doing a curriculum review for the computer science department of an independent school in Charlotte, North Carolina, along with Barry Webster, a computer science teacher for an independent school in Detroit.  We both spend yesterday observing AP Computer Science (didn’t understand anything I heard — it was so cool), Computer Graphics, Web Design, Computer Applications, and some Logo Programming with 1st graders, using MicroWorlds (hand heard about MW in years).  We also talked in depth with the teachers and the department head, as well as folks in the instructional technology department, technology support, and some of the school directors.  We’ll talk with the Head Master and Upper School Director today, and have other conversations.  Then Barry and I will meet and decide how to best serve the school.

One of the issues in contention there is a course called Computer Applications, where students learn to use the Microsoft Office suite (sans Access, thank goodness) and keyboarding.  The question that nags at me this morning, as I get ready to catch my ride over to the school, is this, “Are computer applications something that should be taught in a class, or something that should be learned by the students, independent of a class curriculum?”  I guess what keeps tugging at my thoughts is the idea that anyone who can figure out how to play World of Warcraft or The SIMS can probably figure out how to use a word processor.  They probably will not learn all of the features that they might be taught in a class, but if you can figure out the basics, then any other specific feature is only as far away as a little time at figuring it out.

That’s all I’m going to say at this point, except that I’ve just posted a new survey (look right).  It’s not scientific and probably a bit unfair, as most surveys are.  Please do click your best answer and explain by commenting on this post.

Thanks!

Now this Impressed Me

Martin Traverso, a Ning user and member of the Network Creators social network, generated this video visualization of Ning in action.  This is what computer science is about, making visible, that which is normally invisible.

Ning Visualization
Here are Martin’s comments from the “chatter” on the video’s page.

Ning Visualization – Ning Network Creators:

When a user navigate between sites, a line show up and fades after a while. If another user navigates between the same two sites, the line will get an extra shot of “energy” creating the illusion of being persistent.

For the more technically inclined, the visualization was created with a Java program that listens to our visit tracking system in realtime.

Networks are rendered using a repulsion model — i.e., they try to move away from each other. Visitors moving between networks create temporary attraction forces between those networks. As a result, related networks tend to cluster together over time.

Visitors (dots) fly towards the center of the bubble for the network they’re currently visiting. Their actual path is randomized a bit to create the swarm-like effect.

This is too cool for school!