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