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