:Connecting the Dots

So at the end of a long day of tromping around the exhibit hall and running from presentation to presentation, I was having a very overpriced drink at a reception with some of my friends yesterday and the question was, “did you see anything good today?” The answers were a pretty unanimous “not really.”  Unfortunate.  Is there a lull in innovation, perhaps the result of tough economic times?  From the exhibit hall to the concurrent sessions, it felt to me like there was a malaise about the place yesterday.  A couple of quick notes, though:

• Patrick Ledesma and Lara Long of Fairfax County Schools gave a very tight presentation on blogs and wikis in Special Ed.  This was the best I saw today: organized, knowledgable, lots of examples, and a diversity of tools.  What I learned wasn’t earth-shaking, but it was helpful.
• I spent a lot of my time on the exhibit floor talking to document camera vendors.  For a few years now, I’ve considered the Samsung document cameras a well-hidden secret, due to their excellent hardware and reasonable price point.  But I’m seeing a lot of strong competition from other vendors like Elmo and AverMedia.  Where they beat Samsung is in software: come on Samsung, let’s clean up that interface and add some features.

Further updates as events warrant…

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Another year, another NECC.  My conference started with an “extra-curricular” visit to the Newseum, Washington D.C.’s newest museum.  The Newseum’s focus (as you may have guessed) is the media: a history of newspapers, TV news, and more.  The highlight was the top-floor room with a giant timeline starting in the 1500’s and extending through today.  All along the timeline there are pull-out trays containing the front page of newspapers reporting on the events of the time.  It’s all here, from reporting on the Salem witch trials and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War to the crash of the Hindenburg and “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  Wow.  This exhibit was worth the price of admission alone.  Other notable displays included a gallery filled with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from the last 50 years, pieces from the Berlin wall and a full-size guard tower, and a memorial to journalists who risked – and lost – their lives reporting the news.  The Newseum is not to be missed in DC and it got me in a good mindframe for the conference: people communicating, connecting, learning about their world.

Then came the keynote, Malcolm Gladwell.  I’ve read The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success and enjoyed both, so I was looking forward to this.  He basically went through a lot of the material from Outliers but framed it in the story of Fleetwood Mac and made a more direct application to schools.  I’d heard it before but what struck me the most – probably because it’s also a theme in this week’s reading in CASTLE book club – is the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at anything.  Both Gladwell and Willingham (the author of the CASTLE book club book) make this point.  Willingham goes even further to say that, since this is the case, we should give up trying to teach students like they are experts – a pretty clear denunciation of constructivism.  Gladwell didn’t go quite that far: he focused on “respect for difficulty”, experimentation, and learning by compensation as the hallmarks of a quality learning environment.  But both of these guys have me thinking a lot about rigor: how difficult should school be, and for whom?  How much repetition in the classroom?  If we’re not teaching kids to construct knowledge and they need so much time to practice things, what does a classroom look like?

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I don’t write a lot about “the industry” here but I can’t resist sharing a quick thought on how things are changing in the world of computers and the internet.  Microsoft, once the behemoth of the technology world, announces a new search engine called “bing” and puts it into production.  Reviews have been mostly positive but with their preview video of “Wave,” Google still somehow managed to not just steal the spotlight but to boot Microsoft right out the front door of the theater and to the curb.  Everyone is talking about this product – which is just a step above vaporware at this point.  Think about that for a moment: a single video of a product that is not even in beta yet displaces announcements about a shipping product from a – once “the” – major technology player. 

And then think about the vision of these two products:  Google is attempting to do nothing less than replace/evolve e-mail, the bedrock application of the internet; Microsoft is, well, making another search engine.  Where is the innovation and who is in the driver’s seat?  It seems to me the answer is clear, and it’s an answer that none of us would have predicted ten years ago.

“Wave” says big, sweeping, tumultuous.  “Bing” says “pebble bouncing off my windshield.”

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