NECC Day 2 Ian Jukes Workshop

Day 2 – Ian Jukes

Biggest, most important idea
Think the continuum – from where we are to where we will be in 10 years – need to set a small step goal for moving towards where you need to go…

websites and boks he showed here:

http://del.icio.us/mehines/jukes

One of the important ideas Ian kept stressing was that it is critical to understand the power of exponential thinking – we have tendency to treat where we are today as what we should implement, but like a quarterback that needs to throw where a receiver is going, we need to plan for where things are going and consider this rapid change in our thinking

awesome idea – book search feature in google. Many books (including the ones I bookmarked in delicious) have previews in books.google.com. Worth looking at.

For instance the one book that Ian recommended more than any was teaching for tomorrow (Ted McCain):
http://books.google.com/books?id=oDsvkqgj_NgC&pg=PR5&dq=teach+for+tomorrow&sig=ACfU3U1i9Hg38FeUIkAP-dhcCXmct1w9Cg

The Morning:
Ian went over the 4 major exponential trends that we need to consider as we think about preparing for planning:

Moore’s Law – the trend will contune for the foreseeable future – faster, small, cheaper
Photonics – the trend will continue to increase – bandwidth triple almost yearly for the foreseeable future

Internet – its tremendous growth will continue (he didn’t particularly talk about web 3.0, but I think this should matter – the evolution of intelligent agents will be a powerful new use of the web)

Ian made the point that most teachers have never left education – they have been in the system since they were 6 years old – they have paradigm paralysis – too close to the institution to see its needs through new eyes.

He talked about the TTWADI (That’s the way we’ve always done it) mentality – used a story of conditioning monkeys in a cage (shooting them down with a water hose if they tried to grab bananas – they stop trying and will actively prevent any new ones – even if they are new to the cage – it becomes accepted practice).

Story of railroad tracks – why? Roman Chariots – why are SRBs the width they are – had to fit in the tunnels built to accommodate tracks

We talked about what are our accepted practices which are part of the TTWADI mind set – school day, textbooks, class size, teacher training, school year, grouping by age, subjects to study, etc

He made the case that in 1937 the US had the longest school year in the world, in 2008 we are at or near the bottom – longest is singapore

“When the going gets tough, the tough get traditional”

Based on trends in Moores Law, In 2019, the typical computer specs:

Memory: 208,000 GB
Hard Drive: 40 TB
Processor Speed: 1.2 THz
Price: $1.37

What does that mean? ubiquitous computing

he quoted Marc Prensky quite a bit in the presentation (in delicious link above)
Makes the case that although most of us reember before the exponetial curve took off, our kids have always lived it – they expect it

Quoted Kurzweil quite a bit (just googled – he has a ted talk here:

The book the singularity is here – recommended in delicious inks above

What will kids need to know? In answer to question about how much is too much, he kept revisiting the idea of BALANCE – need to honor botht he things that we know plus include new ways to thinking.

Mentioned a book he is planning on reading : turn it off (delicious link above)

Another BIG idea – too many things happening – whether you are an experienced tech user of a beginner – take baby steps – just pick one thing and start incorporating it – don’t over immerse (just like training – if you go too hard, you will hurt yourself and not come back).

on the topic of Photonics: Gilder: Telecosm: The world after Bandwidth abundance (delicious link above)

Talked about the emergence of wimax and wibro in the next few years

gotta go to more sessions – will add to summary later…

NECC 2008 day 1 Sat June 28

NECC Day 1 (Saturday June 28)

Prelude…
Well, after getting in to town ok, I poked around San Antonio Friday afternoon: Convention Center, River Walk, Hemisphere park, Tower of the Americas, some of downtown. Found a great family mexican restaurant (Mexican Manhatan) celebrating their 50th year of family owned operation. Good food, great folks, clients were mostly local residents (unlike the Riverwalk which seemed to be mostly visitors).
Got back to the hotel and started catching up on email and looking at info online – ended up staying up until 2 am – set my alarm and promptly overslept. Woke with a start at 9am! My First session on Moodle and more was at 8:30, so I knew was late. By the time I got dressed, walked over and got my registration materials it was almost 10 am when I walked into the session (it was an 8:30-11:30 session).

Act 1:
The session was run by Carmalita Bieniek and Jeanne Myers. Even though I was late, the nice thing was that since they were using moodle to teach the sessions their entire outline and resources were within the moodle course they had set up.

Sections I missed but I will be able to go back to in their site:

What is online learning?
Some nice resources here – youtube video on What it means http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a32eDsxDfjY
They then had participants participate in a forum they posted asking for reflections on the video, participants could respond to other’s postings.
Had a link to reserach study by Babson and Olin College “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006” I have that resource now.

What do teachers need?
Link to outside questionairre: http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/olfac.html#lecturers
Link to teaching style survey: http://www.longleaf.net/teachingstyle.html
Online learing: Do you have what it takes?
http://members.shaw.ca/mdde615/index.htm
Quiz: do you have what it takes?
http://www.emporia.edu/lifelong/geninfo/newskills.htm
They then had participats get into groups for a chat about teacher readiness

This Where I came in at 10 am

What is moodle anyway?
One nice link is the moodle plugins and modules:
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009

We need to look this over some more to see what things we might be missing from our current moodle use. The version we were using in the workshop was v 1.9.1 but our current classroom revolution version is 1.8.4. I need to find out why we haven’t upgraded to v 1.9.1 yet. here were some nice additions to layout and design in te newest version.

Using Delicious
This was a very cool section – even though I have used delicious for years, I really hadn’t realized i have only scratched the surface of this – both as a standalone web 2.0 app, as well as how to use it wthin moodle.

This was the most powerful thing I got out of our time in the session – that it is important to bring Web 2.0 tools into your moodle site.

We spent some time using delicious, including how to use well. One of th things I had not done much is utilize the tag features in delicious – now I get it! Once you accrue hundreds of websites, you absolutely need to use tags, as these allow sorting by tags. For instance, if you use the tag distancelearning then when you want to see your distae learning sites, you just select that tag and only those sites will show. Powerful!
I uploaded all my bookmarks from Safari into my new site I made (del.icio.us/mehines) and now I have a delicious site with 1234 sites. Of course, they are not tagged well, but it is a start.

The cool thing is that in the settings of delicious, you can create both tag clouds and tag rolls and these can be imbedded into moodle – both into a specific section or on the side windows. Since this is a dynamic feature, when you update your delicious site, it will update in the moodle window! Here is an example of a tag roll for delicious for my necc2008 sites:


necc2008 link roll

They also showed a nice youtube on delicious that is worth sharing from the folks that make ***in plain english
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

We also talked a bit about how twitter can be imbedded into moodle as well

The last 30 minutes was spent letting us play with a class they set up for us. A few of their recommendations:

If you require passwords and don’t allow guests, then you are covered by fair use legislation for your class. teachers can post and use resources the same as regular classroom.

First thing when setting up a new course is to turn off all the windows other an the administrative window. Then only turn on the windows you want to have. Just because they come in by default doesn’t mean you want them.

The most important thing I got out of the workshop was that I should be using moodle for my next generation pueo web server for teachers. Because Moodle has great built in resources (discussions, forums, wikis, blogs, etc) and allows sorting by topics, it should be a natural fit for my needs for our teachers.

The rest of the day, I volunteered as a greeter for 3 hours – got to meet a bunch of great folks. I was greeting with a woman Elizabeth from Puerto Rico. I need to find her – I didn’t get her contact info, but she was interested in linking up with a Hawaiian school for a classroom blogging project, or maybe ivc as well.

Enough for now…

Ruminations on Kamehameha Conference

Well, the Kamehameha Conference was last week here and was fantastic. The only bummer was not being able to attend all the sessions due to my schedule. I missed Mark Standley, which is a disappointment – he was wonderful when i saw him a couple of years ago.

Here’s my thought of the day. One of the sessions I attended was David Warlick’s “Build your own Personal Learning network” which cut to a very important issue for me in my role on our campus – how to get teachers to be more connected to information, resources, & others. I was really impressed with the resources that David shared – most I know, but it was affirming to see that the idea that I have been struggling with had merit. On of my goals this fall on campus is to spend more time helping teachers utilize this kind of capability of the web. It fits nicely in with my goal of building more professional learning communities – more on that idea later…