Just a reminder – all my links are posted at del.icio.us/mehines/necc2008

Innovation exchange (wed 8-12),
Richard Baraniuk – Rice University keynote
Topic Opencourseware and open education

First talked about the difficulty of writing and publishing textbooks. (difficult to connect, build content, high cost, limited access/audience)
new model for text book publishing: music and ipod thinking – vibrant, interactive, community based, current, innovative, up to date, inexpensive

Motto for new music: create, rip, burn, mix – this is the model he is striving for!

His Site: Connexions

Some basic tenants:

Liberate Course Materials
from -> to
book -> page (xml coding)
shelf -> interconnect global repository
closed -> open source (creative commons license)
cost $$$ -> free
Slow -> fast

Think legos – each discrete can be built into a customizable, powerful, reusable, personal experience
creative commons – you retain copyright, but open access and open license

motto share remix, attribute

Invite Participation
communities, grass roots, organizations

gave specific case studies in how materials had been authored – bot the old way and the new way to make his case. Talked about an individual music instructor (Catherine Schmidt-Jones) who had the expertise, didn’t think of herself as an author and ended up sharing her expertise – thousands have used her materials

OOPS (open source, open courseware prototype systems) – chinese translation system – eng to chin and chin to eng – thousands being done

Showed a print text that was created in connexions – cost $20 (money to author and publisher zulu) – cost of book $20 – would usually be a $150 text in a bookstore

The Road
semantic/markup
new interoperability – math xml, Music XML, chemistry xml – so objects can be cut and pasted from text to programs

Development
web 1.0 (broadcast, access) -> ex mitocw
web 2.0 (remix, community) -> ex curriki, connexions,
web 3.0 -> feedback, xml, intelligence
increasing openness – thank about music – they have just moved to open drm
recommends the article in wired one on radiohead – david byrne
article in wired : Free! Why $0 is the future of business (delicious link)

Talked specifically about how many university publishing houses going out of business – but now are shifting over to connexions

How to get involved: adopt a text for you r class, mix your own, contribute to the knowledge.

Question – what about resources for k12 – they are still in infancy – shuttleworth foundation is supporting – others to come.

NEXT each panelist talked (13min max) about a specific technology they saw as emerging, innovative and relevant for k12

Kurt Madden talked about asus pcs – about how their small footprint and low cost was the right solution for is disctrict.

The machines only have a 7” screen and small hd but for the kids of work students do, these are perfect machines. There is supposed to be a $200 version coming out with linux this year.
Mark’s thought: so what if there were an option for a laptop program or students? Even those parents who felt that they couldn’ afford a $800 HP or $1000 mac laptop woudl be able to use this as an option – it ties into what we already know about where things are going – more about net connectivity and cloud computing than the apps on the computer. With tools like google docs, bubbl.us, wikispaces, etc does a laptop have to have windows or mac os to be effective for the classroom 2.0 project? We will still have a couple of pc and mac labs for students to come and do projects, but if they think of this machine as their school pda – access moodle, edline, library resources, etc….do they need to have a nother tool? The linux kernel is optimized for this as well , so runs fast (15 second boot up) and
Maybe we could give all teachers this device next year as their “classroom 20 cloud computer”. for $200 per teacher (200 x 100 = $20,000) we could potentially create a new model for tech use. – will it print to network, will it attach to ldap or active directory?

Lee Keller
synchronous PD
Lee talked about the emergence of tools that allow real time teacher support that are now powerful enough to take the place of traditional f2f development. In his district he runs a weekly 30 tech coffee talk with adobe connect, though there are other tools – free
wixiq (mark found this – needs to play with) dmdm (?) yugma, ooVoo
then of coursr there are the paid for standards adobe connect (ISTE uses), elluminate (UH Uses), wimba (DOE teleschool uses),
All these allow archive of past conferences so learners can reattach to the content

Kathy Schrock – apps on a flash – she showed a project call apps on a flash – she calls SOAP (Students Owning Applications Portably)
Allows kids to put both apps and files they create on a single drive so they never are with their apps. There is both a mac and PC versio of this
PC version at portableapps.com mac version at http://freesmug.org/portableapps
She also talked about the kindle some – the big deal with kimble as far as ths meeting goes is Richard Baraniuk says they are in talks with amazon to allow opencourseware books to be available to the kindle – this would be huge!

Camilla Gagliolo – talked abot a project using the nintendo ds Lite in elementary schools. I was dubious until….. I tried them during play time – holy crap! it is a very robust, easy to use platform. Think about a few simple tasks – since they are native wireless with each other a teacher could have a class set and have kids both practice writing, answering testing knowledge – all viewable by all – kind of a IM/Twitter/class response system. There are some pretty good apps available for the platform – math, language – yes this thing has a built in mic, so students can pratcice spanish – speaking and listening to their voices on playback. It coms with a bunch of character sets – japanese and european language included (really!!!!)
I gotta buy and play with this – i even has an add on web browser with 802.11 capability

Is this the possible 1:1 tool for elementary classrooms – no. Is this a cheap, durable powerful classroom tool – yes!

Leigh Zeitz
(It was supposed to be David Thornburg, but leigh filled in)
Leigh talked about collaborative tools online – jing, awesomehighlighter.com, mebeam (multipoint ivc)

-specifically google docs. Since most folks were familiar with Google docs, he showed the forms feature in t that is pretty impressive – you create a question in the spreadsheet side, anyone your invite to the url can input and the data accrues live – need to play with this

his admonition – live with courage, teach with vision

Just a reminder – all my links are posted at del.icio.us/mehines/necc2008

Notes from sessions and thinking…

Workshops from Tuesday July 1

Kathy Schrock Get a MUVE on – power of synchronous online environments (Tues 11-12)

background of tool – how to use

http://kathyschrock.net/muve – this is the one stop resource for Kathy – all the resources from her presentation (including the slides) here. Her pdf is a complete capture of her slides.

goals
history
components of online spaces
selected resources
new gen of muves

history – from MUDs to MOOs to MUVE

Dr Barry Ellis (1997)- research on learning in these environments
live interaction
indiv and grp work
varied preset formats
learn from teacher and studets
resources to share
activity monitoring
engaging and motivating

components: (compani and mornigstar – reserach teams)
communication,
collab: whiteboards, annotations, apps share, screen share, co browse
present{ view, file share, response, session record}

selected resources:
tapped in – 1997 nsf & sun
acrobat connect (used to be macromedia breeze) – new version has virtual breakout rooms
next monday (830 est):Web 20 and You

elluminate: (mark knows and likes)

WiZiQ – free

Wimba – (we know)
second life (she considers next gen)
joe sanchez – utexas – exploring virtual worlds

why second life
a new frontier
experience a new interface
learn skills
distance education and other events
second life groups: ex k12 educators iste discovery ed
global networking
collaboration

examples of sites
teaching and learning:
main grid and teen grid

$ us = $1000 lindens
$2395 for and maintain ed for a year

she had a bunch of sites posted

literature alive – in sl

commonspace for progressive organization

virtual morocco

roma

ibm – tennis simulation
second life pioneers – (from web quest – meet the immigrants)

Her real passion is pd in second life

where – iste – good home
terra incognita – phd to explore learning in sl
discovery ed network
lighthouse learning island (her second life presence for her staff)

she bought an island in 2007 june
talked a bit about her island – structure, how it is set up
she showed a video of her PLC in Sl fro 10 hrs of training

she talked about the difficulty giving a presentation in sl

skoolaborate

quoted research from Bagi and Crooks

user centered environments?
transform of learning practice by learner?
constructivist practices
authority in virtual space
change in class roles
altering of assignments

pertaining to my research – is this a place to be looking toward – or is the hardward/bw requirements too much still – for how long?

Alan November (Tues 1230-130)

on his site – free resources for learning

He polled the audience o ask about what ways technology has changed their schools – he asked questions about things like when we will have open book tests (use resources to answer an original problem instead of testing for memorized content), when are students acting as self directed learners, instead of receiving information from teachers, etc. Essentially the vast majority of responses indicated a very traditional structure to schools. And this was a very advanced group – that’s why we were there!

essentially he said 30 years of tech in ed have made almost no impact – he gave some specific examples – sad but true –

He talked about his sons recent experience – traveled with him to china – very funny but sad story – bottom line was he was given detention for missing school – even though it was an educational trip, even though he offered to blog and find connections for the classes he was missing, even thgouh he did all the work his teachers assigned when he was away, even though other students were excused for other trips (athletic, college tours ,etc) – INSANE!
One Alan’s big drives is to have students understand mre about the power and structure of the internet – how to look for and understand information searches – example – if you look at an event like “middle east riots” it only shows us and european resources on the first page of google – by using restrictors (like site:tr or view:timeline) there are better ways to get info. It is reminiscent of the “How People Learn” book talking about strategies experts use when solving problems – they have a hierarchy of strategies that enable better thinking and depth. He has geat web literacy tools o his website.

Give kids problems to solve that aren’t about memorizing but empower them to think

One of his running idea is breaking up classroom activity to enable rootating jobs in a class – for exampe a coupe of kids who are the class web researchers for the day – checking and adding information to the class

he showed the advanced search feature in google (under more…still more)
you (anyone) can build their OWN search engine that has only pre-chosen web sites to search wthin – or you can use ones already nmade by others

Some strategies for teachers he proposes that requires a student’s job description of active learner:

Have kids build a search engine for their class – or an elementary teacher lead a group of students to build one together
Kids produce learning objects – for example they each need to make a tutorial for class usig a tool like jing. He showed an exampe of a math teacher (who happened to be in the audience) who has his 6th grade students make math tutorials) – needs to be short (under 3 minutes) clean, undestandbale, trasportable to ipod, dvd etc, so ther kids can use it.Then publish it on the web!
He calls Jing “low hanging fruit” – “We are spending too much time teaching teachers to use tech – start sending 2 student with each teacher to become their class experts o technologies.” This is a genyes model
Alan pointed out that reserach on audio books sows that the narrator’s voice changes the impression a listener has on content – he poonders student vioces – male female, cutural would have an impact
Curricukum deisgn teams organized by students (this lines up with effect history instruction from ch 7 of How People Learn) he has links on hs website on how to do this as well
Official scribe for clas (this is an idea Bob and I were just talkig about this month) appoint a few students each class to be scribes in google docs so all can share at end. Takes th ecognitive load off most and put quality pressure on the scribes as they ned to share at the end “too many kids are using the laptop as a $100 pencil” another example – instead of making each kid doa sperate powerpoint, have then create a common ppt in google docs – thank of the power shared knowledge, tracked usage for formative assessment, feedback loop from peers…
Ad value to the world – he asked – how many teachers had added an ebtry to wikipedia? (a few) how may had their students add? (almost none)
he gave an example of a 3rd grade class that went on a field trip and built a web page in their visit (pitot house) – the kids created it, took ownership – very empowering – the =comments and edits that occur after are the real powerful part of it
another example – kiva.org – students contributing to a needy world project -there was a teacher in the audience that has 16 ongoing kiva projects – very cool!
his site has a link in resources: digital learning farm

Lead21 Meeting

This a team of professors from Johns Hopkins Univ looking at a program for Leadership teams or individuals form schools – they used this venue as a chance to get feedback on the program –

data driven decision making

modules – establishing an infrastructure, etc

after kick off – school leadership team walks through a supporting module

month or so – online community is a support network – both support and expectation

{{mark wonders if this might be too top down – ownership}}

one of their predispositions is that teachers want o know how to make kids succeed – is that our problem? Are our teachers struggling with this? (mark thinks not)
one of their targets is reg and spec ed teaching – not applicable for us

one of the modules – monitor how teaches are doing and working on what goals they should have in pd

their checklists align with iste standards

They initiate the data collection and the content

It looks like they are looking for schools that want to be involved integrally for the use of these

the importance of a school team —

Strategic Thinking about Technology in Education – Panel discussion
leadership from ISTE

First question – new president – what to tell him about needs and role for tech and ed

what should feds role be – usgov – built the infrastructure for transportation – need the same for tech in ed

robust authentic assessment model – not just bubble tests