Note-Taking at ISTE

Notes I took during the EduBloggerCon

Quite a few people have commented on the note files that I have been sharing from the ISTE 2011 conference in Philadelphia. So I thought I would share some details about my note-taking process.

First of all, concept maps seem a logical way to take notes for me. They do not, by nature, expect complete sentences, but do carry a visual syntax of relationship, which is easily editable during less pertinent moments of a presentation or workshop.

The challenge has been to find a tool whose interface is simple enough for quick work, rather than just for the slower and more deliberate idea mapping, for which most concept mapping tools are designed.

I’ve used this technique for years on laptop settling on XMind, an open source product that is free, provides cloud space for sharing, and is cross-platform (Mac OS, Windows, & Linux). In February of 2010, XMind’s blog mentioned plans to develop an iPad version, but none exists at this time.

However, there is a plethora of other mind mapping tools available for the iPad, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For a long time, my preference was SimpleMind. But its freeform functionality, though highly effective in some circumstances, requires attention to maintaining an practical flow of ideas.

I finally settled on Mindo, which is the app I used at ISTE11. It’s main power is the ease of use. When entering a list of items, I merely type the item name (I prefer to thumb on my iPad) and then touch [Next]. It starts another sibling box that fills as I continue to type. I can also start a new sibling item by double-touching just above or below and existing idea box and a new child item by double-touching to the right of an existing box.

Another huge benefit of Mindo for me is the fact that it will export to Dropbox in a variety formats — including xmind. So I can continue to work on maps on my laptop and vica versa. Other export formats include:

Mind Mapping Application for iPad - YouTube

PNG – An image format which is what I typically use to share my notes at a conference.
PDF – Perhaps another logical format to use at conferences, but I haven’t tried it yet.
TXT – In outline format and coded in HTML.
OPML – Obviously a meta data markup language.
MMAP – Not sure about this one
FREEMIND – Possibly the most used open source mindmapping format. Most tools will export as FREEMIND
MPAD – The native Mindo format

Click the image to the right and above for a video of Mindo in action.

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Where is This Coming From?

Larry Baker 'Challenging the Challengers' by Katie Morrow

I noticed it, that the presentations and workshops I was attending at ISTE this week were more effectively delivered, compelling, and entertaining than I remember from past conferences. I assumed that it was because of luck — I happened to be in the right place at the right time. But then I started hearing the same thing from other attendees, that the sessions they were attending were better than they’d experienced before.

So, having thought a bit about it, I’d like to speculate on some possible reasons. Mind you, these are only speculations.

Luck – This is certainly a possibility (or probability), that I was talking with folks who were, like me, ISTE-charmed, draw to those presentations and presenters that fulfilled and exceeded their conference expectations.
Presenters are simply better – Frankly, most of the sessions that I attended were presented by people who were accustomed to presenting at conferences. But I heard more than once about renowned speakers who had simply improved substantially over the past year. What I do at conference, I would have to consider to be a craft. I work to refine and improve my craft as I’m sure all of us do.
Presenters getting smarter – I suspect that this might be one of the weightier potential reasons — and it is not that we’re increasing our brain mass and capacity. But I suspect that as we increase and refine our skills at cultivating and learning from our networks, we are collecting and contextualizing more ideas, opportunities, and resources more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
Presentation software is Better – Here’s another one that comes from my own experience. Prezi, the single canvas, zoom, and twirl presentation software from Hungary, significantly effected my presentations in several positive ways. For one, it altered the way that I planned my presentations, as I was working with one document rather than many. Since switching back to Apple Keynote, I’m back to slide decks. But the astounding build and transition capabilities of this software has given me a richer tool box for expressing complex ideas with motion and sequence. I hope that I’m doing that well.
The message is better – We seem to be talking less about test-prep and a lot more about exciting new pedagogies. We may even be talking less about gadgets and more about their application. I would love to see or do some research on presentation descriptions and their inclusion of various flag words to test this out.

Again, these are merely speculations — food for thought. But I think it is a legitimate question for us to be asking right now, right after ISTE 2011. Are we beginning to mature as a movement? ..and if so, how and where do we go from here?

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Next Textbooks are…

A Kevin Jarrett Photo of Elizabeth Davis

Several days ago I submitted a proposal for an EduBloggerCon unconference session asking how social media and social networking might help to define digital (next) textbooks. To help seed this conversation I asked folks, via Twitter, from the train on Friday, to share some defining characteristics of old paper printed textbooks. As the responses flew in, I combined and edited them into more positive descriptions such as standards aligned, focused, unbiased, durable, etc.

Next I created a Google Form survey that asked unconference participants to read a characterization statements about old textbooks and write in comparative characterizations of next textbooks. For instance, if Old textbooks are NARROWLY FOCUSED then Next textbooks are…

This morning I culled through the responses, mixing, matching, and editing them together into a defining set of comparisons. Admittedly, this listing reflects my own biased sense of where textbooks are going.

Old Textbooks		Next Textbooks
•	Old textbooks are STANDARDS-ALIGNED.	Next textbooks will be synaptically aligned to the learning needs and experiences of their users.
•	Old textbooks are CENTRALLY-AUTHORITATIVE.	Next textbooks will establish authority as part of the learning practice.
•	Old textbooks are SAFE & COMFORTING.	Next textbooks will demand and provoke new learning (and teaching) through surprise.
•	Old texbooks are STABLE.	Next textbooks will be fluid, dynamic and ever adapting to learning experiences and shifts in the world, about which we are learning.
•	Old textbooks are ERRORLESS (error ignorning).	Next textbooks will admit errors and will socially self-correct.
•	Old textbooks are NARROWLY FOCUSED.	Next textbooks will be broadly focused through logical and interdisciplinary connections and by adapting to the behaviors of their users.
•	Old textbooks are UNBIASED (self-proclaimed).	Next textbooks will admit their multi-bias, and will invite and share reader interpretation.
•	Old textbooks are PERSONAL/ASOCIAL.	Next textbooks will invite and facilitate conversation and, in appropriate ways, adapt and grow through the conversational behaviors of their users.
•	Old textbooks are MANUFACTURED.	Next textbooks will be co-created, cultivated, and grown by learners and master-learners.
•	Old textbooks are DURABLE BY THEIR RESISTANCE TO CHANGE.	Next textbooks are durable by their adapting flexibility.
•	Old textbooks are HEAVY.	Next textbooks will weightlessly make themselves available to any learner, anywhere, anytime.
•	Old textbooks are VISIBLE.	Next textbooks will glow, grow, and flow, seamlessly reflecting the world through the eyes of a learning community.

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First Impressions of the “ISTE 2011 Onsite Mobile App Guide”

I’ve been saying to myself for weeks that ISTE 2011 needs an app. I wrote them and told them that the ISTE conference needs an app. They wrote back and said, “Working on it.” Couple of weeks ago I found the ISTE Mobile app, which, as a conference support tool is pretty pathetic, though, as an association reference tool, it’s a pretty good start.

ISTE Onsite for iPhone

This afternoon, however, with a couple of hours in my office after flying in from Omaha and getting on the train for Philly in the morning, I did a search on AppShopper, and there it was, posted 17 hours ago, ISTE 2011 Onsite Mobile… (I’m guessing the dot dot dot extends to “App”).

I haven’t looked at the iPhone version yet, but the iPad app is pretty awesome at first glance. It’s essentially a web page with all of the sliding windows that we’re accustomed to on our touch devices. Starting with the upper left corner is a Twitter roll, featuring a post from techfish21, 6:08 PM (currently 6:36). It only appears to display the latest feed’able 15 posts, which is a bit less than overwhelmingly useful. But we have other great ways to follow the conference buzz.

To the right is a calendar of events, divided by day, with a popout for each touched event. I am very impressed that it attaches to my planner. Even though I’d rather do my planning with a full screen web site, I know that there will be times when I need something to go see right now, and this will come in quite handy. I’d like it better if I could select a particular session block and see only presentations/workshops for that block of time. There is an icon to the right, “Coming Up,” that doesn’t seem to function yet. I wonder…

iPad version of the app

Directly beneath is a slide’able alphabetical listing of presenters and exhibitors with popout details. The exhibitor details can click out into a map of the vendor hall. Now that could be handy.

In the lower left are icons for “Gallery,” still empty, and “Videos,” broken down by day. Upper right menu bar features a thumbs up, to review the App on the iTunes App Store; two friends, which clicks out into an email message announcing the app that you can address to family and friends; a magnifying glass for searching;and the reload icon to get the latest content. There’s also an (i) for information icon with info on the company who made the app, quickmobile.

On the bottom menu bar, and here’s where it gets interesting, is a maps icon. Touch it to get a floor plan of the exhibit hall, linked to details about the company. This seems less practical than it could be, because there are no titles in the map, so you’re clicking a booth number to see who’s at that booth. Maybe I’m just not thinking ahead enough.

Further down the list are maps of the various levels of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, labeling lecture and session rooms, playgrounds, and lounges, posters sessions, etc. I’d like it if I could swipe through to the various levels, rather than having to back out to the menu. Also, I found that the maps loaded rather slowly. Perhaps that’s a first time thing.

Other icons are:

FaceBook – takes us to the ISTE FB page,
Sponsors – obvious,
Overview – at a glance schedule,
Info Booth – further links to helpful references, including a glossary (Bloggers Cafe: A lounge featuring participatory blogging events and ISTE Unplugged)
ISTE Connect – linking out to the Iste Connect web site,
About ISTE
The NING

Overall, I think that this is a great beginning, and a tool that attempts and succeeds to an impressive degree, to create a one stop resource to cover conference attending functions that we’ll all be relying on a dizzying array of individual apps and web pages to work.

Opps, the dot dot dot extends to Guide, not App.

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Examining Your PLN

I’ve been struggling over the past few weeks with a complete redesign of my PLN presentation. I am keeping the title (A Gardener’s Approach to Learning), since that’s what I called it for my ISTE proposal, some distant months ago — and for other more obvious reasons. I’ve delivered versions of the upgrade at other conferences recently, and, well, it’s not ready yet.

One element I would like to add is pruning your PLN or learning garden. The best I have done so far is to suggest some philosophical guide lines, but little of practical value. So I spent much of yesterday searching for tools that enable us to more scientifically analyze our learning networks, specifically our Twitter communities (or megalopolises). I was starting to get rather depressed at failing to find what I was looking for — and inspired. You see, when I’m looking for a technical solution to a problem, and I can’t find it, then I start wanting to build one. This is not good, because I am desperately trying to simplify my life here/now at the tail end of my career.

But building a new tool? Wow! What fun that would be.

Anyway, I found the right search expressions this morning (4:00AM). It’s amazing how much a good four and a half hours of sleep can do for the old noggin. Of course, this serge of cognitive magnificence will last for only about an hour and a half.

So here are a few of the interesting tools I found. To start with, let’s say that you’ve run across a blog entry that’s caught your interest and you are considering a click of his Follow Me link. You have to wonder if this educator actually limits his work thoughts to his blog, and reads and tweets for his favorite Twitterlebrities. To see, just paste his screen name into foller. You are rewarded with the blogger’s basic specs (number of friends, followers, status updates, etc.), a word cloud of most tweeted words, recent hashtags and mentions. You can also view a map indicating his geographic reach (see right).

Another tool for measuring the potential of a new deep thinker is Klout. Probably more of a vanity oriented tool, Klout does do a nice job of breaking down a person’s influence by topic.

Another tool with a potential to help us cultuvate our learning gardens is Twolo, which allows you to enter keywords of interest and receive a list of Tweople you might want to follow. There is a fee after four days, which is not surprising considering how important social media has become to the marketing industry. No worries. Twitter has recently incorporated the same service with Who To Follow.

Of course adding new members to your network is not pruning, is it? One of the most interesting tools that I happened upon was refollow. When you link in with your Twitter account, you get a wallpaper of the deep thinkers whom you follow. To cut back your network, you can sort the layout of avatars by their last tweet, tweet count, follow count, and friend count. It’s reasonable to assume (though not always appropriate) that the people who are most paid attention to, or are paying attention to other deep thinkers , are the most useful for your own learning. This is certainly not always true, but it is a measurable aspect of one’s networking. I found that I was following eight people who hadn’t chirped a single tweet and several who’d not tweeted for 8, 10, and 15 months. There’s more that you can do, but to actually act on your community (follow or unfollow) there is a fee — reasonable if I were engaged in marketing an important brand.

If gaining and keeping a following is important, then TweetEffect might be useful. Essentially, you enter your Twitter screen name and it scans your most recent tweets and aligns them with your follower activity. In other words, which tweets seem to have attracted people, and which made them turn tail and run. I learned that in my last 195 status updates, I lost followers seven times and found new one eleven times. It seems that my announcement that I was finally adding Oklahoma (48) to the state’s I’ve worked in, compelled eleven people to leave my friend list. Still trying to figure that one out.

- Posted using BlogsyApp from my iPad

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What’s the Next Big Thing (@ ISTE)

Infographic of Word Trends for ISTE 2011

I’ve seen the question a number of times on Twitter, “What’s going to be the big ‘buzz’ at ISTE this year?” In the past, it has been blogging, podcasting, video games, MUVEs, and others. This year, well who knows. But to get a glance, I collected the text for all of the session, poster, and workshop descriptions and anayized them for key terms and phrases. It’s something that I do frequently, but this is the first time I have compared an upcoming conference with a past one — in this case, it’s ISTE 2011 with ISTE NECC 2008.

The attached file is a PDF that includes a word cloud of the most used terms in this year’s program descriptions, and a count of the occurrences of session descriptions with key words that I scanned for back in 2008. There is little that is scientific about this, but interesting, none the less.

For me, I was surprised to have seen infographic mentioned only once in all of the session descriptions. Although we’ve had infographics almost for ever (think The Periodic Tables), it has emerged as something of a buzz in recent months. I’ve started a new blog called IGAD (InfoGraphic A Day), where I feature different graphics or datasets that could be translated into graphics. Today’s infographic is “A Better Life Index.”

Another one that I was surprised not to see a lot of (and not entirely disappointed) was QR-Codes. In state and regional conferences I’ve been a part of recently, QR-Codes seem to have become something of the rage. Again, they’ve been around since 1995, but only recently have educators been testing out applications in classrooms and schools. I think they have a place in education, but there are logistical limitations, and do only one thing really well — they can turn a flat surface into a hyperlink for smart phone users.

See you at ISTE 2011!

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Looking Forward to ISTE 2010

The Colorado Convention Center
(cc) Photo by Intiaz Rahim

It’s one of the interesting, often regretful, and often delightful aspects of being an independent consultant (free-agent educator) that weekends have very little meaning. I am often traveling on Saturday or Sunday, sometimes presenting, or working in my office at least part of those days. At the same time, there are often other days of the week that feel like weekends. I have spent the last two days either presenting to education leaders or to classroom teachers, or driving to or from Williamsburg or Berkeley County, West Virginia. Today is wide open. Even though I still have a few hours of driving home, having made it as far as Roanoke yesterday, it feels so much like Saturday that I’m almost expecting to spend the morning watching cartoons. I’d love to get home before 8:00 to watch Mighty Mouse and Sky King.

It will be a day off, but also a day of preparing for my trip to Denver and almost a week at ISTE 2010. It’s our first International Society for Technology in Education conference that’s not a NECC, and I have to confess that it’s left a bit of a hole in our conversations about the event. But it won’t take anything away from the experience, I’m sure.

My calendar is more than full with most of the time slots in my planner sporting the yellow exclamation warning of overflow — conflicts. There are lots of highlights, including EduBloggerCon, TEDxDenverED, and ISTE’s theme of excellence exploration on Sunday afternoon — plus much more.

I’ll be delivering two formal presentations, one as a spotlight address (Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience) and the other as a thirty-minute general address (Patron 2.0: The ‘Natives’ are Restless) for the Media Specialists SIG gathering. In both of these presentations I will map out some of the important qualities of our students ‘native’ (outside-the-classroom) information experiences with their social networks, video games, and their hyper-connectedness, and suggest some ways that those qualities might be integrated into our classrooms, libraries, and school culture.

It occured to me this morning that I am suggesting a unique choice for us.

Will we benefit more from fitting video games and social networks into our curriculum — our methods and pedagogies?…

Do might we benefit more by expanding curriculum, methods, and pedagogies to encompass and harness the truly unique qualities of the millennial information experience?

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Come Along Inside…

People are starting to show up — that is, avatars are starting to gather.

Last night was interesting — and you know what the old Chinese wise man said. It was a new experience for me, to present to an audience of Avatars in Second Life, and I want to thank Lisa Perez and the AASL – ISTE SIGMS learning community for the invitation.

The challenges were many for me, as a person who is not exactly at home in the virtual realms. First of all, the participants were avatars, appropriately dressed and polite (no giant yellow ducks), but puppets none the less. Now multiply any discomfort by a million when you consider that most of the people who are driving the avatars in front of me were actually out-of-body, experiencing the event from many different angles. I wondered earlier this morning if it would help to reflect this element of the experience by having ghosts of the avatars appear in varying degrees of transparency. Although I would have had a more accurate sense of the environment I was speaking into, the spook factor put that thought out of my mind in a nanosecond.

A large part of the event was to be handled as discussion, which was also challenging to me. The few folks we got on with voice worked out well, I thought, and was especially pleased to have Peggy Sheehy expand on a new blog she is authoring for the teachers in her school. I do not know how many people were sitting around me, but I found the chat to be advancing to fast to gain any usefulness from it.

Of course, none of this was bad or in any way a barrier to the potentials of virtual environments as learning places. The communication is different. It is multidimensional. The are avenues of dialog that I haven’t even explored yet. I want to do this again, and with this experience behind me, I have a better sense of how to structure things.

A floating & Interactive Concept Map

For instance, I spent a better part of yesterday morning (and the day before) re-acquainting myself with Linden Scripting Language, a fairly accessible programming language that you can use to design function into the objects you have built. I’ve found it useful lately, to include concept maps in my online handouts, as I am coming to depend much less on presentation software in my face-to-face presentations. I wanted to take that to Second Life, but rather than a static graphical arrangement of signs, I needed it to build as I presented the ideas. To the left, you can see what it looked like during a trial-run on ISTE Island earlier in the day.

It started with the image of Ms. Coolbeans surrounded by small dots. As I approached each of the concepts, I could click the appropriate dot, and it would expand into the box or cylinder for “Web 2.0,” “Finding Nodes,” “Sticky Content,” etc. Once expanded, participants could click the boxes to launch a web page, which aggregated related web sites out of my Delicious account.

I had also figured out how to have each expansion of a box advance the slides in the middle (Ms. Coolbeans being the initial slide). But I neglected to protect the buttons that came with the free script that I hacked. So people kept advancing the slides on me, and I eventually ignored them and relied solely on my magnetic voice. No wonder I didn’t sleep well last night.

You have to get swept up into the vortex of this thing to access the content. Not terribly practical to me, but it turns content into a place, and I think that this has potential.

The best thing I could have done was to have folks break out into logical groups, and Lisa Perez and I discussed the possibilities before people started showing up. There really weren’t the facilities available to do that, making me wish I had acted on an impulse I’d had earlier in the day. The picture to the right is something that I took several months ago on ISTE Island. I do not remember the event or even the topic. But I do remember how the presenter was able to turn his content into place, that avatars/agents had to actually go to.

My wish is to take the eight-legged concept map, and turn it into a building with eight wings. At the end of each wing would be a room where people could meet and talk about blogs, wikis, and microblogging; or techniques for growing your PLN; or tools for mining the conversation. If I’d had this, then I could have sent groups of avatars to the various wings to share what they know and what they want to learn. There could be slides, signs, and perhaps even dynamically aggregated blog postings related to the topic.

I’d like to build a PLN Pavilion. Does anyone know where there might be some space for this?

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Books Written


Cultivating Your Personal Learning Network 2nd Edition (2012)
	Redefining Literacy 2.0 (2008)
	Classroom Blogging (2007) • Lulu • Amazon
	Raw Materials for the Mind (2005)

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Teaching & Learning in the new information landscape…

Note-Taking at ISTE

Where is This Coming From?

Next Textbooks are…

First Impressions of the “ISTE 2011 Onsite Mobile App Guide”

Examining Your PLN

What’s the Next Big Thing (@ ISTE)

Looking Forward to ISTE 2010

Come Along Inside…

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Teaching & Learning in the new information landscape…

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