Monday June 29

{{did not attend morning sessions, as I volunteered from 9-noon}}

I attended A session on Second Life in Education.
Since I arrived about halfway through the presentation they were already into the part where they were talking about sites and visiting them. A few of the sites they visited: the Alamo, which had been set up for last year’s conference in San Antonio. They went to a marvelous site for the war victims from Middle East were each soldier has a plaque or information about them. They visited genome island where you can do things like fly inside the cell and click on the parts to learn more about how they work. At that point the question came up on accuracy and it was agreed that teachers should help the students plan for the appropriate use of these sites by checking them in advance. I had a conversation later in the conference with Westley Field who is working with Linden labs to develop a more controlled easily accessible environment so that some of these issues won’t be as difficult.

I attended a session titled
“teachers learning in networked communities” this was a pilot program with a bunch of schools (U Washington, U Memphis, U Colorado Denver) to build an online community for supporting pre-service and student teaching. They chose the platform Tapped In which they recognized although it is still very old-school in its approach and its compliance with Web 20 protocols, still serve the basic need for them and building a community, having public and private areas, having file repositories, supporting synchronous and asynchronous conversation,etc. the program was very successful for them, however, once the need for the students to be part of the community ended, few stayed on. One of their goals had been to expand the site from her just true service teachers, but they still need to do more to understand and use professional who are not required to come to space. Of course, if we look at the research from Ito that was mentioned in Lemke’s presentation this year, the closer these tools aligned to the more personal networks to students use — things like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the more likely we are to make the spaces inviting enough two continue to sustain conversation professionally. someone else from the University of Washington mentioned that they are looking at using elluminate as a tool to connect students together. (Mark’s personal feeling is that although this is a useful tool to support an online community, you can only be one piece as its synchronous nature doesn’t allow for the full opportunity of knowledge building that happens in asynchronous environments.)

The next session was with Scott McLeod

who maintains a website:
dangerously irrelevant
his goal for this topic was disruptive technologies — based on Christensen’s books and writings. This was a great presentation which was highly attended much to my surprise. Apparently even the most traditional of the public schools are beginning to understand that they need to look at new models of change. He first covered the ground that Christiansen had in his latest book and then talked about things schools need to do in order to survive. One of his points at the heart was the research and viewpoint that if schools don’t make dramatic change happen, they will struggle to change their organization. One model that he discussed was creating a new organization rather than trying to change the one that you currently have. This is much in line with our (MPI) initiative in the high school, where instead of trying to change all the school at once, we decided to try and innovate a school within a school with the hope that we would learn from that school what works and what doesn’t and make further determinations if we want to expand the size and reach. He finished with some insights, what schools should do, more detailed notes are located on the in the documents section listed below

my document repository (notes, slides, etc) here: