ISEnet Ning Nearing 500 Members

I've been spending time nurturing the ISEnet ning (with Fred Bartels) rather than blogging here. It's been interesting to see it develop and grow. It's certainly more interactive than a single blog site (unless you're a blog superstar), since it has so many users visiting and commenting on the discussions, blog entries, and other content. Fred & I got interviewed by Alex & Arvind for EdTechTalk on Wednesday. Some key points that came from this discussion:

• The ISEnet is a good safe place for educators to experience online social networking.
• At this point it is mostly tech coordinators and librarians, but could balloon as it is shared with schools' faculties
• It provides an identity based network separate from larger ning networks like classroom2.0
• It aggregates content from participants, including discussions, blogs, videos, etc.
• It may have more appeal to right-brained people than more logico-linear communications vehicles like listservs & wikis
• It may be an ok place to have student interaction, as opposed to facebook

Caffeinated Showering Revelations

I love the first hour of the day: quietly crunching down Cheerios, reading the online NYTimes, no distractions, dark french roast, hot shower. This morning I had something of an epiphany about how to feel more progress in school change process. For years I've been working within tech departments to create conditions for changing classroom dynamics towards more student-active, authentic, creative, thought-provoking, project-creation, problem-solving activities. I've always also worked with curricular and professional development coordinators, department chairs and the faculty. My realization this morning is that expecting change to originate from within the tech dept is a misplaced conception. We know that change comes slowly, is a "messy" process, and requires collaborative relationships of trust. We have to build consensus, demonstrate proof-of-concept, and celebrate successes. Keeping the network flowing stably and abundantly through the infrastructure wires is important, but it's only the stepping off place, and not the engine that will drive meaningful improvement. So this leaves me thinking it's time to focus more change efforts on the curricular coordinators and avoid the trap of pushing the tech department to take on a task like this for which it is ill-designed.

More Notes From David Warlick

Will Richardson recently asked this question: How do you keep track of the snippets of info and quotes you want to remember? This is one of the things I do with my blog. The last few posts I've been cataloging notes from David Warlick, and here is one more... As I watched his pre-conference keynote to the 2007 K12online conference I took a few notes: On his son's multimedia project: "he learned how to create it because he's part of a network... because he's connected." David also talks about his son's game world and how they collaborate inside that virtual world. On the skills necessary in the information economy, David says, "information must compete for attention... the nature of information has changed. Our notion of what it means to be literate must also change." And in speaking about the opportunities for publishing which the web now provides, David notes that, "from the publishing perspective, many of our students are more accomplished than their teachers!"

School Change

Once again, Will Richardson has nobly articulated an idea which has been rumbling as an undercurrent through the educational technology blogging and professional development community. His blog post, "School as Node" discusses the future of School as becoming one "node" within an individual's approach to learning and education.This blog post is the closest thing I've read to outlining a concrete philsophical kernel for an evolutionary/revolutionary development of schools operating systems to adapt to the socio-cultural changes being enabled by information technology. Read it!

New Job, Same Challenges

If you notice the dates, it's been quite some time since my last entry. This is because my wife and I moved from Maryland to Tennessee in June and I'm only now getting the chance to get back to my blog. The thing which has struck me most about my new job is the importance of humanware. In other words, the human relationships within a school, among the teachers, and between the teachers, administration, students, parents, and technology department. Having worked in several schools now, and visited many others, I am struck by how the culture of a school and the relationships among its constituencies will impact its success with using technology to improve learning. These relationships seem to me as important as the dollars spent on servers and software. Cultivating them and building a team-based approach to problem-solving is the challenge.

Videos Show Concepts Better

It's amazing how a <good> video can explain a complex concept much better than a text or oral description. For example, try to explain the nature of non-linear digital hyper text. Now show someone what it means with this video. Or, try explaining RSS, then watch this video. Of course, there are also loads of terribly boring videos. Creating a good video takes a lot of work. Do you have other videos that show or demonstrate hard to explain concepts? Videos as a publication medium for student work is certainly a powerful concept, but how many classroom teachers are willing to give the time to this type of project? It's a leap into the unknown if you haven't done it before.

Blogging is HOT

Blogging is a reflective writing activity which can be approached as a way to demonstrate Higher Order Thinking skills. Will Richardson describes this in his book and in this blog entry. As I pondered writing the entry below "Sky is Falling," it struck me how I wanted to tie together all of the various items I linked to there. This process of synthesizing, linking, and evaluating is demonstrative of the thinking skills we want our students to hone. Having them blog seems like a good educational approach, but they will need instruction and practice to do blogging well. I gave my eLearning grad students this blog rubric to help guide their process. The thing I love about blogging is that it creates this physical artifact that shows whether your students are 'putting the pieces' together. Are they really understanding the concepts? Are they drawing connections? Are they expanding on others' thinking?

Give Every Student a Web Page

Here's the idea: every student gets a web page for their academic career that includes one-click access to all past grades, reports, portfolios, etc. Teachers, counselors, parents, and others (with contolled access) comment on their students' pages, offering advice and college counseling. Kentucky implemented a system like this recently. You can read about it in eSchool News. They characterize it as "Myspace meets Monster," in other words, social networking meets career networking. I like the idea because it could be implemented from the beginning of a student's middle school years, and could serve to focus their understanding of themselves as learners, developing over time, and working towards long-term goals.

Electronic Classroom Etiquette

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article commenting on how professors feel challenged by the distractions which laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices afford students in their classrooms. As described in the article, many students are making poor choices...surfing the web during lectures, IM-ing or emailing off-topic, and generally not taking advantage of classroom dialog. The author makes a good point that we need to create a better ethos of responsibility around the classroom use of mobile technology or "e-etiquette."

I teach every day in classrooms where my students have laptops and I understand this concern. Students need to be taught what is okay and what is inappropriate. They also need to learn to take advantage of class discussion to hone their communication and critical thinking skills. These skills will produce agile flexible learners -- one of the dictums of the 21st century skills report. However, I don't think that removing the technology is the answer; I think teachers need to learn management strategies to skillfully make use of technology which supports and enriches classroom dialog and resources.

Being able to seamlessly integrate virtual classroom tools broadens the opportunity for participation and extends the discussion beyond the time and place of the classroom walls. A simple strategy is to teach your students what "half-mast" means: the laptop screens must instantly be put half-way down so they cannot be seen (for purposes of discussion), but leave the computer on for instant transition back to an electronic activity that supports the learning context, such as taking notes, researching a website, back-channel chat rooms, posting on a discussion board, or collaborating online.

When I was a student I took all of my notes for every class using a tablet. It gave me an unprecedented level of organization. At my fingertips I had every note, every email, every resource that I'd ever explored. When the teacher mentioned a name or topic I was unfamiliar with, I could google it and was able to contribute more to the class discussion because of this. When the teacher presented a topic I had their powerpoint slides in front of me to annotate. I could switch to a concept-mapping program to brainstorm and organize ideas that were being presented. I could pull up Excel to calculate my grades. Using Windows Journal or OneNote I scrawl my notes, doodles, and diagrams that help me absorb what the teacher is saying. I draw diagrams at meetings of who is sitting where to help me remember names/faces, and who had made what contributions. I can't imagine not trying to give students this same tool. It is so powerful. They just need to be taught how to use it appropriately for their own benefit.

Putting the Printing Press in Perspective

This is an incredible time! It seems like every day brings news of some new tool or an easier way to do something that extends our ability to communicate, interact, and publish online. Today on the wizards list-serv someone mentioned Stickam, a website that creates an easy way for anyone to include a live stream from their webcam onto the Stickam site or onto any other webpage. This new tool certainly adds to the challenges that schools face in teaching kids what is appropriate, safe, and for that matter, useful.

This revolution of communication tools is allowing anyone with an internet connection to publish in any medium, and allows people to network and connect in new ways [text, audio, video, synchronous, asynchronous, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many]. Content is subscribable, taggable, and popular content bubbles to the surface of user-created folksonomies. It makes the revolution which the printing press wrought seem almost mundane... and we're only on the cusp of this change. This is an incredible time. For my own little publishing contribution this week in this brave new world of online presence, I just put up a home movie [Windows Media Player required] of our new dog, Gilmore, from our trip to Hilton Head. He wasn't quite sure how to pick up a frisbee that lands face down :)

This new publishing phenomenon also raises sticky issues about intellectual property and copyright -- my video uses clips from three songs as background music. Since they are each only a short portion of the song, I felt okay about including them. I came across an interesting rule about copyright of music for online radio last week (can't remember the source), but as I understood it, it said that providing music online is acceptable so long as the user cannot control the stopping or starting of the songs, or save them. I guess this is how the internet radio station Pandora is able to operate. Speaking of Pandora, and new ways of connecting-- it's a customized radio station: you tell it what types of music you like and then it sends you a stream of music based on your taste.

So all this new media leaves me wondering if we even realize the impact it is having and will have on our society. Working within a school it certainly seems imperative to address it and deal with some of the thornier issues with our students. Unfortunately, as many ed-tech gurus have noted, our students are getting very little exposure inside school, and almost all of it, on their own at home. We do lecture them about the dangers of giving out personal information on the internet, but meanwhile, they may be streaming their lives to a new network of like-minded computer-connected users flung far and wide. In some ways it feels like the train has left the station and we're still sitting in a coach & buggy wondering what that loud noise was.

Wiki Replaces Personal Document Storage

I was interviewed on the webcasted EdTechTalk show last month about the used of wikis in education. The show's hosts, Alex and Arvind, are great guys and it was fun to participate in this new form of media which feels a lot like radio on demand. The guys' demeanor remind me of Click and Clack on CarTalk [I hope they take this as the high compliment it is intended as]. At any rate, we had a nice chat and explored a few wikis, but I forgot to mention one area of wiki use which is most intriguing...

In my everyday work I am finding that I am much more interested and motivated to save my informational documents onto a wiki page as opposed to into my personal computer's "My Documents" folder. I'm very involved in the SchoolComputing wiki and also an eLearning wiki which my Hopkins' class created. I'm now finding that when I want to save a document during my normal day's work, I want to put it on the wiki, not in my personal files. The reasons are multiple... Most importantly I hope others will improve and add to my documents. Beyond that, having it on the wiki means I can get to it from anywhere, I'm hopefully contributing to others' knowledge, I can find it again easily using the "Search" function on the wiki, and I can link among documents easily. As examples, I recently collated some ideas that flowed in from a list-serv I'm on about the use of DyKnow software. Rather than saving this collation of ideas as a Word file, I put it on the wiki here. I am also working to adapt my faculty technology competencies document into Alex's page here. I find it fascinating that the wikis are replacing my "My Documents" file storage system. It's changing my understanding of document storage, intellecual property, and collaboration. It's a huge paradigm shift.

A Good Day for Technology Integration

Last Thursday was remarkable. One of the teachers at my school planned ahead to have a sub and spent the day working with me on projects to implement within her curriculum. She did this instead of going to a conference for a day, and I think this was much more useful for her. She could easily have gone to a conference and gotten jazzed about some new tool or technique, but so often when that happens there is no follow through. Instead we worked on two projects which she will be implementing over the next few weeks. The first project uses Audacity which is a simple sound recorder on all the students' tablets. The students will record songs which they've written about the book they are studying. The second project will involve using a wiki with another of her classes. She also got comfortable using Windows Journal to project to her math classes. The school saved money by not sending her to a conference and the curricular gains are clear.

Of course, I didn't spend every minute of Thursday with her... I also stopped into a 7th grade math class whose teacher has been experimenting with DyKnow over the past few weeks. This innovative software allows the students and teachers to share an electronic notebook. The teacher's screen is projected. Problems were sent out by the teacher and each student worked a solution on their tablet. Some students demonstrated their solution (and their thinking) to the class. The teacher could see (and capture) what each student was doing for each problem. Each student leaves with a copy of the notebook and can play it back in sequence to see how problems were solved. This piece of software promotes an environement in which all of the students are very actively involved with working through content.

After lunch I met with our Teacher Institute coordinators who are planning for the first class of graduate students at Norwood this summer. We talked about the various digital skills they will need to master and realized the list is fairly large.

I also met briefly with the faculty advisor for our student newspaper. We are transitioning from paper to electronic publishing this year and we just published the first story! All in all, a very good day for technology integation.

Teaching Students You Can't See

Alan November speaking at NYCIST mentioned a Stanford study in which teachers had an experience of teaching online. They overwhelmingly reported that the experience of "teaching students they could not see" fundamentally changed their approach to teaching. Interesting!

The Essential Processes of Learning

I came across a reference to Stanley Pogrow in the Marshall Memo today. I hadn't heard his name before, but have of course studied Higher-Order-Thinking-Skills and Socratic questioning method of teaching. Pogrow's 1987 article about research into his HOTS approach details four essential thinking skills: metacognition, inference, decontextualization, and synthesis. I hadn't realized there was a technology component embedded into this HOTS approach, but it seems that he advocates using computer simulations to provoke problem-solving thinking around the scenarios which are presented.

Great Video Production by Students Misses the Point

A recent post to the ISED list-serv by Matt Frattali who attended the Building Learning Communities 2006 conference sponsored by Alan November recommended that: "This video should be seen by every student and educator in the world." The video is indeed a great example of communicating ideas through the medium of digital video, and the students involved did a great job in using this medium; however, as I watched the video critique the pedagogy of teaching by lecture I got the sense that the students were missing the point. The students repeatedly suggest that lecture is a bad way to learn and instead they should be allowed to make movies or use technology in other creative ways to express themselves. <no argument there!> But what seems to be missing is an understanding that building thinking skills is hard work that involves dialog and grappling with ideas. The socratic method and lecture are a big part of this process. I have no idea how boring the lectures were that these students had to endure at their colleges, but I don't think the answer is necessarily to abandon the expertise of professors for the creativity of the media lab. No doubt the answer lies someplace in the middle, but expressing ideas and advancing arguments with writing is a skill that deserves these students' attention.