:Connecting the Dots

Well, another NECC has come and gone.  My family flew into San Anto yesterday and we’ll stick around Texas for the next week or so.  I was so drained from the conference that I fell asleep at 8:30 PM and didn’t wake up until 7:30 the next morning.  That’s close to a record for me.

Anyway, I’m still sorting it all out, but here’s a few of my initial reactions/reflections/thoughts/questions:

“Student-safe” Social Networking Sites are Big

I saw a number of these guys on the show floor, most notably Uniservity and SayWire.  There were others but these are the two I remember because they were such an interesting study in contrasts.  SayWire felt very provincial with a USA-only focus.  It was demoed for me by a teacher from Ohio and the emphasis seemed to be on collaboration within the school or district.  In contrast, Uniservity, a UK company, decked its booth out with flags of the world and brought students in from Hong Kong to demo their software.  Interestingly, they seed collaboration by launching their own content and projects for schools and teachers to sign on to.  SayWire essentially provides the network tool (similar to Ning, I suppose).  I think Uniservity’s global outlook is much more exciting.  Of course, there’s always TakingITGlobal, which I’ll be taking another look at after hearing about it in a number of sessions.

Going Global with VC

Along the same lines, the conference renewed my interest in moving our district beyond virtual field trip videoconferences and towards collaboration with other classrooms and institutions around the world.  Jody Kennedy’s session with Global Nomads Group, Global Education Motivators, and Global LEAP may have been the best I attended, and having dinner with Wayne from GEM hatched all kinds of ideas in my mind.

Synthesis (?)

I heard the term TPCK (”Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge”) in two separate sessions and, as I understand it, the whole idea is to pull back the lens enough to see how technology fits into the broader picture.  Are we finally almost there?  My friends John Ellrodt and Maria Fico discussed in their session how thier non-profit, GlobalWRITES, supports poetry slams and writers workshops using videoconferencing.  I’ve seen them present on it before but what struck me this time is how uninteresting it probably was to most of the pure techies in the room.  Not because what they do isn’t good - it’s amazing.  But because the technology in their project is at once essential and unremarkable.  The focus is on the content and the learning.  I was happy to learn that John and Maria will be presenting at NCTE, where I think they will get a very warm reception.  Maybe the discussion is finally getting past the tools.  Maybe…

Best Product

As our teachers and students have started to generate more multimedia, we’ve struggled to find a place to put it.  In many cases, we want to limit access to the district’s teachers and students only.  And we want to be able to stream the audio and video files we create.  Our CMS limits the size of file uploads and there is very limited support for RSS, so podcasting would be difficult if not impossible.  Enter Discovery MediaShare.  Each school has it’s own space to upload user-created content and, according to policy, one or more approvers can release files created by students and teachers to the rest of the school, the district, or the whole world.  The media files stream and there are very generous upload limits.  And, yes MediaShare does RSS.  It also integrates with the rest of the Discovery Streaming, so when a user searches the database, the scope of the search can include user-contributed content and the usernames and passwords are the same, to boot.  I’m really excited about this product.

NECC Unplugged

I met Steve Hargadon after the Classroom 2.0 BOF session and shared with him my enthusiasm for NECC Unplugged and my ideas about how it could be better situated near the Blogger’s Cafe next year instead of directly in it.  What a nice, thoughtful guy.  I’m optimistic that NECC Unplugged will be a highlight next year and for years to come.  It’s great to have a place where the “little guys” can share their ideas and successes, try out potential large-scale presentations, and learn from one another.  I’m looking forward to doing multiple presentations next time around.

That’s it for now.  Still leafing through pamphlets, URL’s, and notes.  But also just enjoying this very pretty city.

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In preparing a lesson on internet research last week, I was reminded of just how important it is to try your searches in multiple search engines instead of just relying on one favorite. I was looking for a current topic to explore with the ninth graders with whom I would be working and decided to give the recent protests in Tibet a try. It was fascinating - and very scary - to see the differences between the list of sites returned by Google and Yahoo when I entered the search term “lhasa riot” (Lhasa is the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region). Google’s results included a number of YouTube videos (who owns YouTube again?) and links to reports of the events on a number of western news outlets. The Yahoo results, in contrast, featured links to ChinaDaily and People’s Daily Online, both Chinese sites sponsored and controlled by the Chinese government.

A mistake? An anomaly in Yahoo’s search algorithm? Maybe not, considering Yahoo’s documented cooperation with the Chinese government in its efforts to censor search results to eliminate anti-Chinese content. Are students aware that these things are happening? Are they aware of the immense power that these search companies wield as gatekeepers to the internet? How many of our students - how many of us - actually bother to perform a search in two search engines instead of just relying on that first page of results from whichever one happens to be our favorite? We’ll drive across town from Best Buy to Circuit City to make sure we get the best TV at the best price but most of us (myself included) never take the time to shop around our important questions about what’s happening in our world. Perhaps we should…

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This month’s PC Magazine includes a blurb about the new collection of historical map overlays in Google Earth. I think that once you start overlaying data onto that spinning globe, Google Earth goes from being a really neat gadget to a seriuos tool for exploring global phenomena and relationships. Using the overlay and some placemarkers, I did a quick study of how the shape of southern Manhattan has changed over the last 150 years:

Things will really get interesting when kids and teachers start playing with the “Lewis and Clark 1814″ and “Middle East 1861″ maps. You can learn more at Google Earth Geography Awareness Week.

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I just finished watching a 2005 video of Thomas Friedman lecturing at MIT. He provides a nice summary of his thesis in The World is Flat and explains the “flatteners” that are re-shaping our society and all societies. This was a “refresher course” for me, having read the book about two years ago. It’s especially powerful hearing it right from the horse’s mouth and having the whole thing boiled down into a very coherent, engaging, and funny one-hour presentation.

There’s a lot to think about there when it comes to schools and technology. The part that really got me thinking was when he discussed Paul David’s study of how the advent of electricity didn’t bring an increase in productivity …until business practices and structures evolved to take advantage of the new tools that were available. Silos powered by steam pulleys had to be replaced by warehouses with electric conveyor belts. Obviously, a conveyor belt is useless in a silo, but it took someone who could imagine life beyond silos to understand how they can be best used. It’s Shoshana Zuboff’s automating (10% productivity gain by using information technology to do old tasks better) vs. informating (massive productivity gains by using information technology to do things you couldn’t do before).

Schools are still silos with a lot of command and control and a lot of barriers to collaboration with the outside world. We distrust people who come in to the school. We worry about what kids will see and who they talk to when they go out of the school. We compete with other schools and teachers instead of learning from them. We replace a blackboard with a digital whiteboard and the teacher proceeds to give the exact same lesson - the same notes on the board, the same quiet copying into spiral notebooks - as he did last year before he got “wired.” We wonder why all of those computers and projectors didn’t magically transform our classrooms when the students are still sitting in the same desks in the same rows with the same textbooks hearing the same lecture.

So I guess schools don’t have to change in the face of all of these new technologies, but wouldn’t they be wise to? Why wouldn’t I want my students to videoconference with students in India instead of just memorizing the population of India in some textbook? Come to think of it, whatever the book said would undoubtedly be inaccurate; I’d place far more trust in Wikipedia’s number…

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