In Tony Wagner’s book “The Global Achievement Gap” he talks about the problems with standardized tests (SAT, AP, etc) and the fact that they don’t measure the critical skills that colleges and workplace are asking for. He then gives an example of an instrument that has been developed for colleges (initially) and secondary schools to measure critical thinking, problem solving and written communication. The college version is called the CLA (College Learning Assessment) and the secondary version is called the CRWA (College Work Readiness Assessment). They are designed to be given to entering freshman and graduating seniors to identify what progress students have made – it is not for assessing students, but effectiveness of programatic efforts to build better problem solving skills. There is more information on their website: http://www.cae.org

The instrument is a ninety minute open ended problem where students have to understand and attack a problem given multiple resources and possibly divergent outcomes. This was the first I have heard of this and am intrigued by the notion of utilizing this to assess student thinking.

It seems somewhat like the ETS iSkills test http://www.ets.org/iskills we piloted this test on our campus 2 years ago and were impressed by the design and the unique challenges it presented students.
A few issues we saw in the iSkills test and I think would be similar in CWRA are that there is not extrinsic motivation for students to give it their best attempt, as the results are not used for any college or work related goal.
Also, I wonder if this is measuring all we need it – for instance it doesn’t look at all the dimensions folks like Pink and Wagner champion – group work, empathy, symphony, global awareness, etc.

The use of technology here to assess student development in critical thinking is a powerful opportunity for schools to see what is happening in these 21st Century skills.
One provocative idea is to have staff take the instrument as well – as much to consider what a problem solving assessment is like for their own assessment, as well as to understand the test from a student perspective.

Real thinking assessment is rare in education. Still one of the finest curricula and assessments I have ever used in 25 years of teaching was the IPS curriculum http://www.sci-ips.com/. The final assessment at the end of understanding properties of matter a was a ‘sludge test’. Student pairs were given a mixture of solids and liquids and given a week to separate and determine the constituent parts of the mixture. Each mixture was unique, so even if groups talked about strategies, each team’s approach and identification was unique. It was clear to me 20 years ago that this was doing REAL science and made scientists of my students. The students were excited, challenged and REALLY engaged.

This is a post I recently put up on another blog that was about Daniel Pinks Book “Whole New Mind” and whether his assertions are correct:

HI All – my 2 cents on this.

I agree with the sense that most people have that Pink’s assertion that we need to move into the 6 qualities (symphony, empathy, etc) so to create a new sort of economy is questionable, if our motivation is to fill in the gap for outsourced jobs. There are way too many dynamics for this to be a certainty. To me, the real reason to do this is to allow schools to reach the full potential of our students. As a secondary educator for over 25 years, it has always bothered me that our design of schools favors and rewards certain behaviors and tendencies (conformity, left/linear thinking) and thus underutilizes our most precious capital. I have seen far too many bright young minds settle for rote memorization, when depth and rigor could have done, seen students who could have achieved new ways of demonstrating knowledge, but couldn’t figure out how to do it within our current system.

Allow me to give an example – in Ken Robinson’s TED lecture, he talks about Gillian Lynne, the choreographer and how she was failing school until she has the good fortune to be ‘diagnosed’ not with ADHD (what might have happened today) but with a talent for movement.
4 years ago I was covering a summer school class for one week (the equivalent of 5 school weeks – 4 hours per day) in science – most kids were in to advance their course work and were amongst our most motivated and successful students (some would say they were our brightest, but that would dishonor Pink and Gardner’s point of view that they are all bright, just with different capabilities). One student in the class was Bill (name changed) and it was clear there was something different – one on one Bill was engaging, funny, very interpersonal. In a class of 20 he was always in motion, needing interaction, active. I found out he was a very talented ballet dancer at the age of 14. This isn’t a big surprise – we have a school of the arts with certificate programs in Dance, Theatre, etc. It became clear that we needed to adjust class for him, so I allowed him to stand and move around when we were doing more traditional activities like class discussions. I also knew that he learned better when he could interact more, so I allowed him to pair up with a another student who liked to talk on the fly as well. This seemed to help – he wasn’t doing great, but he was happy, productive and getting it. After the first week, I turned over the class to my cohort and found out that at the end of the course he had failed. By the fall his parents had to take him out of the school, because he was not doing well enough. I always saw this as a failure of us (me included) to recognize the diversity of ways kids CAN learn and our need to ADAPT our instructional approach to reach all students.
My school is a relatively wealthy school with lots of resources, smaller class sizes and passionate educators. If we couldn’t make it work for him, how many kids do we have in public education that are just written off and drop out or never see their true talent reached? He was fortunate that his parents had the resources and found a different school that he succeeded at – how many Bill’s are there that never do? Drop out rates in the US are over 30% – over 50% in urban areas. Is this some indication?

So Pink’s thinking for me is more about schools not laying waste to so much human potential. When the US was so dominant in the world economy, we could get away with squandering this resource. If we are to keep our economy relevant and dynamic, we need to fully develop all our students’ potential.

Most of you are probably familiar with the story of George Lucas and his foundation edutopia.org. For those not familiar, in his words:

“Public education is the foundation of our democracy — the stepping-stones for our youth to reach their full potential. My own experience in public school was quite frustrating. I was often bored. Occasionally, I had a teacher who engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. Those were the teachers I really loved. I wondered, “Why can’t school be engaging all of the time?” As a father, I’ve felt the imperative to transform schooling even more urgently.”

OK – Way to long a post…for any that survived to the end – thanks for listening! 🙂

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

Here are the presentations I attended today:

(reminder all important websites for the conference I am posting at
http://del.icio.us/mehines/necc2008

Chris Dede: Immersive Collaborative Simulations and Next Generation Assessments

Web site marked in delicious

he mentioned knowing what students know

cognition, understanding, interpretation

cognition is distributed across human mind, tools/media

marketing video from MicroSoft about distributed learning “unify your communications”

Types of rich datastreams

MUVE: immersion in virtual contexts with digital artifacts and avatar based identities

wikis and other forms of groupware
asynchronous discussions
intelligent tutoring
games
augmented reality

how do we make sense of these kinds of observations

formative assessment – provides more leverage for improvement than summative
particularly formative assessment – much more rich and more accurate than summative – need to use this one the fly to know what is going on.
potentially, formative , diagnostic assessment could take the place of summative!! (he believes this idea)

analogy/metaphor – barcodes on items allow formative assessment in stores so current inventory

new technologies to support this idea
his case for this – alice in wonderland interface

3 types of worlds

worlds to the desktop – accessing distance experts and archives for knowledge creation, sharing, an mastery

MUVE – *alice in wonderland)

ubiquitous computing (wearable always on – augmented reality)

His focus – MUVEs – his argument is that this provides the richest data stream to tap into (he refers this as alice in wonderland)

he is going to use rivercity as an example of assessment

he mentioned that they re still looking at implementation sites – if anyone is still interested

post testing – (traditional)
higher self efficacy on sci method, knowledge gains,

these instruments don’t tell you why, how they succeed

evidence of student work

assessment date – pre/post, embedded (formative) performance a(summative) (letter written to mayor)

contextual data: attendance, demographic, school data, observations, interviews

ACTIVE Data: team chat, notebook entries, tracking of activities, (data gathering, pathways, etc)

event logs provide time stamps on all activities (things like where, who they talked to , what objects they interacted,etc)

what makes this unique is students don’t have to stop for assessment so they don’t behave differently

this approach generates LOTS of data for analysis

he explains river city a little
work as team, keep track of clues, etc

examples of the new assessment info – how much time, range of data collection, saliency of data collected, clustering (grouping evidence)

how to make sense of all this data – ideally live feedback to teachers based on data to improve student learning
if you could get this it would empower student learning

examples – charts of data that show areas of sue tools use, etc

analysis – boys data orient, girls social orient

hand coding of the chat is powerful, but too time consuming?

three levels of diagnostics
Simple: how often to talk,
less simple: what sequence of interactions
complex = follow the pattern of knowledge building through the behavior and of the student

Data-mining:
process of selecting exploring and modeling large amounts of data

Evolution over time

what about something other than second city

distribute learning course:
f2f
ivc
wireless/handheld device
small group collab –

Groupware: (like wikis)
small group discussions (google docs)
convenient access
students find voice
sharing and annotation

issues: master new rhetoric, collective time management, rapid reading and typing, recognition of time and effort, requires time and effort to install and master

chris reflected on past issues with group work – who is doing what work and how we know – now groupware allows better understanding

sociosemetic networking (social tagging) – generates an event log

summary – a huge amount of data is being generated – we have to learn how to mine data and make meaning of it – if a record is kept, this would allow time of involvement, knowledge build – etc – would allow

chris just got two more grants to develop more ideas on this

mark’s thoughts – there is a great area for research here about assessment and the use of data mining for formative assessment – need to share this with the etec group

Classroom 2.0: Exploring the Potential of Web 2.0 
(this was a panel discussion of 5 including vicki davis and Steve Hargadon)

first definitions of wen 2.0 (using O’Reilly as reference)
web as platform (amazon)
collective intelligence
wisdom of crowds (wikipedia)
data as the intelligence inside (amazon)
end of the software release cycle (google)
loosely couple systems – like netvibes
software beyond a single device (facebook)
rich user experience (swivel)

Active vs passive – “participatory web”, read/write web

problems? inappropriate content – concerns about safety
vicki – ‘first penguin off the rock’ – same in schools

one of the challenges to do this is to have assessment for students clear up front so they know what they are expected to do

where to begin to start – teacher needs to get connected to other people who are doing this (mark wonders how to connect some of our teachers)

these tools engage (content rich fun – mark’s definition)
teachers need to find something that will connect to your class
this drives working with students instead of talking at students – they will honor that

vicki ( and most of the rest of the board( use wikis with their classes and using ning)

vicki – wikis – knowledge building (structured information), ning first person conversation/sharing – evolving

great idea – hire IT from apple geniuses

there is a federal plan called dopa – to force fed funds to block social networking

i got the chat saved too- think about the collective wisdom idea – fantastic way to think of classroom learning and outside resources- yay!
Chat (pdf format) is located here:
http://pueo.midpac.edu/technology/classroom20.pdf

Web 2.0 meets Grade 2.0 Gail Lovely

zoho was running tool ppt like tool
280 slides

session – special requirements due to age – keep in mind population

look at some of same tools but with young chid lens

http://glovely.wetpaint.com/ – where se has it posted

wikis
showed insect wiki
just like kwl –

showed counting project – monster project

kids write for detail,other kids draw based on the descriptive writing

she distinguished wikis (collaborative) vs blogs (leader with responses) – not editable

blogs – showed and example of students gr 2 who wrote a blog and 388 people gave feedback – cool

mrs cassidy’s web site blog – very cool!

showed bubbl.us

very nicely layed out wiki of her presentation – I like that she made it model her thoughts, and opened it up for collaboration

again – worth goig to: http://glovely.wetpaint.com/

Live streaming video – will richardson

ustreamtv.com

example of use – stream live performance with archive capability password protection
classroom productions

This is the continued notes from Jukes presentation – was a lot to digest – some people find him a bit too much, but I attribute it to him all consuming passion to be well read and understand what is happening… any way, here goes:

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 both the things that we know plus include new ways to thinking.

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

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)

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

Art Costa’s habits of mind was a reference point for discussion of ways to work with whole person/whole brain (delicious link)

Talked a bit about how student brains are different – the have received different stimuli and therefore have developed different

When pushed about how to prepare classrooms and teachers he referred to two resources – pdf document “Getting it Right” – a resource for technology planning, and “No more cookie cutter schools” where he is going to talk about classroom deign with architect Frank Kelley: New High Schools: Strategies that Work for Teaching and Learning Using Technology

Talking about what technologies have transformational power – he talked about the new samsung smartphone that has voice to text capability of 80 wpm – with 90% accuracy – this is available this year.
Coming soon – interpretive telephony – language translation phones. Some discussion about how often when you talk into a computer system on a cell phone, they are recording your voice to use for dialect analysis.

{{lunch break}}

Recent Brain research focus
Term – Screenagers – what are new brain imaging technologies showing us about how teens brains are different? The amount of exposure to computer technology has made young brains different.
Kids that have been exposed to digital bombardment show different wiring in their brains than older adults – they have different capabilities – most focused around better visual recall and stimuli. Even when kids learn the same things as adults it is stored and accessed differently. MMORPG (Massive Multiple online role playing games) and other inputs are the main cause of this.

He talked about the human brain project (delicious link) that is trying to really understand how the brain is structured and learns. Neuroinfomatics is the field of study – a government and multi-university project

showed examples of brain imaging fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) – shows digital learner brains activate different areas under the same stimuli
New imaging technique – harvard Brainbow (delicious link)

Scientific American Mind article the myths of the teen brain (pdf posted on delicious)

Interesting study on how adults and teens look at text on a page through this technique – adults scan in a relative z pattern – but teens start at bottom, look up the sides of the page and rarely focus on the bottom right. They basically read in an F pattern – that part of the text activates their brain.
Also – color of text – teen brains are more active if text is green, red or hot pink (think wired) – most teens dislike black on white and avoid it.
Mentions prensky’s work on understanding teens use and amount of media – how they have better mastery of CPA Continuous Partial attention (coined by Linda Stone) – which is different from multitasking – CPA is a particular teen feeling for always wanting to be “a live nide on the network”.” (this last part is marks notes from the Summer 08 edutopia article by prensky)

Talked about the difference between kids and adults and how they learn – images vs text, hyper ink vs linear, etc.

Important to state kid are NT the same as they were 25 years ago – especially in their private lives
Two books in this thread of how to engage – “Thinking in Future tense (Jennifer James) Wiggins and McTighe Understanding by Design

jukes: If *we’re* still teaching kids the same way, knowing they’re different, WHO HAS THE LEARNING PROBLEM?

Jukes talked about three ways that technology is used (studies by Hank Becker – link on delicious)

70% are Literacy – how it works
20% are integated/augmented – example word processing – if you took it away, kids would still be able to write
10% is transformational – new things and new ways – if you took it away, the classroom would not work

Balance on this should be equal (1:1:1) – Juke stresses over and over – not throwing out old cherished proven ideas, but finding balance – still ned to teach how to do things, BUT need to include more relevant uses

Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer, DESERVES to be.

Not surprising he makes the case technology use in classrooms is about headware, not hardware

Running out of time – Jukes lists 7 steps to change classroom practice:
1. Catch Up – commit to a digital diet – try new things – blogging, delicious, video streaming, play a MMORPG…etc – he has a link on his site (ianjukes.com for this)
2. Teach to both sides of the brain – he arges (correctly, I think) that success for teaches is usually measured by how the top third of class performs and he feels it should be the bottom 2/3. He argues the top third would have achieved anyhow – they are the survivors. Uses Pink as a source here
move from being consumers to prosumers of information and content
Technologic Fluency
Media Fluency
Information Fluency (5 steps):
* ask good questions
* access and acquire good resources
analyze and authenticate – weigh information for value
apply – context – real life problem
assess progress and product

Social Fluency – webkins, club penguin – start purposefully building an honoring this side of the brain

3. Shift the instructional Approach
4. Let them access info natively
5. Let kids collaborate (example – wikinomics – social wisdom)
6. Products that reflect content and process
7. Re-Evaluate evaluation

(as I was typing this up I found a live blog that ginger ? posted that follows many of my notes – posted here: http://www.plurk.com/p/utg6)
Ginger’s live blog posting is a good counterpoint to mine

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…

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…

First: an aside 😉
As we use tools that are more in line with web 2.0, I find that I am still working on my comfort level. This blog is an example. I am used to the more full drafting capability that a word processor seems to offer, so I have to fight the urge to draft postings first in a Wp, before cutting and pasting to a blog. Is that just because I am ‘old school’?

I have chosen edublogs because I have recently set up this site for creating a space that I can use both for on and off campus as a means to see how a blogging forum can provide a means for communication and sharing. I have not kept a blog before, so this is my foray into this technology.

A brief reflection n the readings.

Wikipedia:
This article was interesting from two levels: As a better mathematical/logical understanding of how social networks can be diagrammed and understood, as well as the dynamics of them.

It mentions that shape of a social network matters: connections made to a network that goes to outside worlds enables greater access to information. Schools typically work as a closed network – at most students might share information within the class walls. This is a limiting factor in the ability of classrooms o provide the best possible environment for real learning. Teachers absolutely need to recognize and use this ability of social networks to empower their learners.

I also thought he terminology of “Mechanical Solidarity” vs “Oragnic Solidarity” was powerful – traditional schools are mechanical and web 2.0 learning is much more organic (think ‘viral’ and how that term has become so relevant).

Primary Psychiatry:
This article did not particularly inspire a lot of deep though in me. As I was reading it, I thought the target audience of medical professionals and how they might consider use of social networking to build community, but the main thrust seemed to be analyzing current tools and advocating for one that he was interested in. As always, I take a lens toward education when I read these articles. Our students are deeply involved in the social networking side of the internet. Is it even an option any more for educators to sit on the sidelines while our students become deeply involved in a technology that captivates, challenges and builds knowledge. Can schools continue to stay relevant if they don’t?

ASBJ: Social Networking can work for K-12 educators
Brief, but relevant. The quick review of how to start a school community thinking about how to understand and use the social side of the web is well taken. The real interesting part of this article is the secondary article titled “21st Century Attitudes”. I think this summary mirrors how many educators feel about how the web (both 1.0 and 2.0). Although many educators are aware of what learners are doing on the web, there is not a real sense of either urgency or understanding of how the social side of learning can be a real compliment to the face to face, bricks and mortar establishments we have made. On our campus we are discussing the kinds of tools that might make the evolution of school as a place to go some of the time a reality. This does not diminish the role of te educator, but it does change it – from center stage to facilitator. Most expert/master teachers did not go into this field thinking this however, so a continued development of their skills needs to happen.

Wired Article: Facebook is open for business
This article mimicked some of the themes covered in “Wikinomics” about opening up the developing platform for greater community use. How might we use this idea in education. Think about the word ‘viral’. The notion that our students would take a content platform and create around seems silly, but if the content were open, students would be able to create, synthesize, develop in new ways. An example: this past summer in our technology class, our students played with “Squeak” – an open ended animation story telling tool developed by MIT Media labs. Our spanish teacher assigned a project this fall that was a story telling assignment using Comic Life. Two groups asked if they could instead use Squeak to tell the story. How is this viral? As they developed their project, other groups were watching and got quickly that the tool their friends were using was more powerful for telling stories and other started looking at it as a means to use. The more educators open the power of using ‘viral’ tools, the beter insght they will have on their learners (market data), which will make their ability to effect learning (sell their wares).

(to see the projects, go here)

Journal Article:
Graf, S, Viola, S.R., Leo, T., & Kinshuk (2007). In-Depth Analysis of the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Dimensions. Journal or research on Technlogy in Education, 40(1), 79-93.

This article first explains what the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model (FSLSM) is, then investigates a survey that measures it. Lastly, and most importantly, the authors try to develop a more detailed view of the learning styles measured in the instrument. The FSLSM has 4 dimensions: active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, sequential/global. The 44 question survey is designed to show learning styles and is widely used to look at how learning styles relate to technology enhanced learning. The authors delve into a statistical model to glean how even more exact characteristics of learners can be shown to effect their success in technology rich experiences. For example, they took questions in the active learning dimension and investigated whether trying something new or social orientation mattered more for learners and found that trying something new had a stronger impact than the social nature of the task.

The implications of this kind of instrument are directly applicable to both teachers and students in technology environments. the one area the authors do not mention, but I am specifically interested in is whether there is a match between staff adoptance of technology and learning preference. Specifically in web 2.0 technologies, if a teacher is reflective, sensing, verbal and sequential does that affect their decision making in technology use.

Planning, Forecasting, and Inventing Your Computers-in-Education Future
Moursund, D
The background information (Moores Law, predicting events, adoption curves, etc) is pretty basic stuff, but when he gets into Delphi method of predicting change the chapter picks up a much higher tome of urgency. The notion that school as a social system is resistant to change is well born out by both studies of reform efforts as well as anecdotal data. When Moursund goes into his own prognostication of the future it reminded me a lot of the old ACOT Apple Classroom of Tomorrow videos. The documents (many dated 1994 or so) paint a picture of teacher as facilitator, student as active, and information as ‘smart’. I was recently reading an article about semantic web – web 3.0 by Tim Berners-Lee. It was striking that the predictions in what will be web 3.0 and eventually 4.0 fall into line with many of Moursund’s primary ideas in his view of learning in 2015. The interesting tidbit is that the evolution of the web will get there long before 2015, as will the capabilty of devices.
As a technology leader on my campus we are looking at new models of teaching and learning to move our institution into the future – to keep it relevant in the face of these emerging trends. Some of our teachers are embracing technology and all its power and ability to excite and challenge students. Other are struggling with their evolving role in this new world. A few are even hoping to retire before they have to change with the times. Our ability to predict change in technology is a small part, but our ability to redefine what school should be in an age of this technologic wave is a greater challenge. Huan nature is a tougher system to change than technology is to predict.