So I’m not in Doha any more….

I’ve made it to the iTSummit, and luckily, before the end of the day.  I’m sitting in Dean Shareski session on disruptive technologies.  He’s acknowledging that the word disruption is not necessarily a seductive term to educators.  But let’s face it…  Handouts are at http://delicious.com/sharski/disruptions.

Dean is using CoolIris for the presentation.  Jeff Utecht told me about using it for presentations a while back, but this is the first time I’ve seen it happen.  It sorta like the geography of Prezi, without leaving the structure of a slide deck. 

We were just asked to talk for a few minutes about what excites us and what scares us about education in the next fivt to ten years.  I’m talking with Cathy Cassidy.  What scares me is what our children will be resisting 15 years from now, that we aren’t even imagining today.

Disruptions

1. Smart Phones — There’s a school near by where a corporation gave Blackberries to a class of 8th graders. 

   Dean is showing a video, probably a dramatization, of a school where all the students have iPhones.  Students are doing things like collaborating, voting in classes, and forming groups — all over their iPhones.  Graphing calculators are $149.  You can get an app that does the same thing for $0.99.  Now he’s showing a video of an app that’s not out yet, that you aim it, as you’re going through the store, and it pops up windows telling you about the things that are present.  That’s pretty cool!

   Now using Poll Everywhere.  Lots of Ahhhhh’s!

2. Low Cost Computing — Re: One Laptop Per Child

   Netbooks are $250, what the kids might be spending on their sneakers.  Is this a way to get to 1:1.  Maybe with this, we can rely on the students to bring them in (not sure about that). 

   With all the newspapers going out of busines, “Giving every subscriber a free Kindle e-reader, and then deliverin the paper through the Kindle, at today’s subscription rates, it would cost 50% less than they’re spending now.  Would love to have the citation for this.

3. Cloud Computing — A lot of schools are looking at Google Apps.  Says he things that Regina Schools are looking at this.
4. Live Streaming — Lots of conferences are Ustreaming presentations, and, according to Dean, it has some interesting implications for the classroom.  Now showing Brian Cosby’s video of a student in his class who is home-bound because of illness.  She’s attending the class via Skype.

   There is a classroom where the teacher is UStreaming all day.

   Back Channeling — Happening more and more in classrooms.  There is a presentation on the K12 Online Conference about back channeling in the classroom.

5. Microblogging — Nough said! Read it for a few minutes, and it looks like blather.  Pay attention for a day, and it starts to look like a short story.  Pay attention for a month, and you have a novel.  That’s pushing it a bit, but I certainly happens.
6. Immersive Environments — Video games and virtual worlds.  Showing a video of a teacher talking about her class in Second Life Teen Grid.

   Shareski says “It’s like social glue.”  I like that.

   Dean just asked which of the tech are a long way off.  I think It’s all close.

   The Next Pertain more to Pedagogy

7. Privacy — Who do we deal with so much of our lives is going online.  Referring to U.S. school where the decree was laid that no teacher under any condition should come in contact with students via social networks.
8. Time shifting — Dean’s question is “What’s face-to-face good for?”  Talking about California teachers who are recording their lectures for students to watch at home.  I asked some students about this in Edmonton, and they didn’t like it.  They said they’d much rather watch lectures face-to-face.  It’s certainly worth trying.
9. Open and Connected — MIT has course on line for everyone.  It isn’t just software.  Also Academic Earth, talks from the top people available to us for free.
10. Outsourced Instruction — Clarence Fisher is doing a project that he calls Thin Wall Classroom, where he and another class somewhere team teach.  I get it now.  It’s about me being asked to deliver a lecture for another class.  May be a future in this.

Tags: iTsumit, warlick, conference, disruption

I’m trying to focus on getting ready for tomorrow’s address for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools convocation.  But taking a quick glance at my e-mail, I just had to pass this one along — a video produced by my friend Carrot Revolution author, David Gran, an art teacher at the Shanghai American School.  It’s entertaining and always eye-opening to see what a Photoshop master can accomplish, such as making David Jakes look good on the cover of Vogue Magazine.

It’s worth noting that the conference is only 29 days away and will certainly be a mega-watched event.

Yes we try and make the Learning 2.008 Educational Technology conference a little different each year. We don’t just talk about changing the ways we teach and learn, we try and model it as well.

I have to confess a bit of unease at this eagerness to stir things up, especially when conference organizer and Thinking Stick author, Jeff Utecht continues, “We don’t always succeed but it’s about taking risks and pushing ourselves as educators.” It is about pushing ourselves, and it’s what disruption is about — a willingness to re-think, re-act, and re-learn.

Being an international conference presents challenges.  Being in Shanghai presents challenges.  For instance, it becomes more difficult for schools to release teachers for extended on-site time, when they’re traveling up to 12,000 miles.  To address this, Shambles man, Chris Smith is building a site on International School Island in Second Life.  Scheduled appearances there include:

• 31 August — Alan Levine and David Warlick
• 7 September — Ewan McIntosh
• 14 September — Organizers of the conference (a forum)

Each event will take place at 06:00 SL time (09:00 East Coast, 06:00 Pacific, 14:00 UK, 20:00 Bangkok, and 21:00 Hong Kong).

I’m sitting in the keynote event now, paying attention to the happenings around me, and trying to rescue my blog at the same time.  After I enjoy James Surowiecki, I’ll head back up to my room to continue working on the blog.  Great intro video play with and nice music.  I can’t leave it alone, with 2? wimpering.  So I’ll be rudely typing while watching and listening.  So sorry for the folks sitting around me.

Here’s the problem.  At some point, for some reason, Google detected malware on a blog page, and stored that little tid bit of info way.  This shouldn’t be a problem since it’s not found anything in the last several weeks.  However, Firefox 3.0 has a new Malware security feature that, when you load a page, checkes Google to see any malware has been detected in the past 90 days.  If it finds one, then it fashes the warning you see on the right.

Since there doesn’t seem to be a way to remove this reference from Google until the 90 days are up, I am trying to move 2? Worth to a new location, http://davidwarlick.com/2-cents/.  For folks who are having no problems at all — users of browsers other than Firefox 3.0 — I’m going to add a redirect.  So there shouldn’t be any disruption — I hope.  This shouldn’t disrupt RSS feeds at all.

Anyway, getting back to the work.

Thanks for your patience.

Will Richardson just Twittered reference to March 11 CNN Money.com article, Welcome to Conference 2.0.  The article, by Dan Fost, tell several stories of recent conferences (SXSW), where presentations were hijacked by audiences who were carrying on their own back-channel conversations about the failure of the presentations or panels to deliver what they (audience) had come to learn.

Here is one scenario from the article:

Of course this is partly the reason for stripping our students of social devices (cell phones) and our computers of social applications (iChat) as they enter our schools — because of the potential disruption that could occur in our teacher/textbook/standards-controlled classrooms.  I would suggest that we need not fear these disruptions, if we can learn to channel them.

The article goes on to list several practices of audience-empowerment at conferences, and I wonder what each might look like if introduced in our schools:

• The “un-conference” model, in which people show up for a conference and the participants pick the agenda and run it in an “open space” model.

  I wonder about a social studies class where the students, with some overview of a range of topics, might collaborate with a wiki to write their own syllabus, and then practice and demonstrate learning literacy skills in mastering the items, through research, reading, analysis and synthesis, and compelling conversation, and then report out to an external audience their findings.

• The “lobbycon” phenomenon, in which people don’t pay to go to conferences, they just show up and network in the lobbies.

  Certainly, this is already happening in the halls.  But I’ve heard of 1:1 schools where it is not unusual for students to spontaneously be gathered around a laptop, discussing an assignment or project.  Of course, the task is to have something going on in the classroom that students walk out continuing to talk about.

• The “panel picker,” an online forum that SXSW uses in which people suggest panels and then the community votes on what they want to see. The winners get to present.

  This is very interesting.  Ask the class to pick the students who will compile and deliver reports on specific topics at hand, and give reasons why those particular students are preferred.  Now we are talking about a classroom where true conversations are an integral part of the learning, such that students discover each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and passions.

• Parties 2.0

  Well, I’ll let you work this one out.

Tags: warlick, education, conference, conference 2.0, social networking

This picture has nothing to do with the conference, except that it is in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, and it is absolutely mesmerizing.

I may have admitted to my readers before, the apprehension I was felling about keynoting the Central States Conference for the Teaching of Foreign Languages.  No need.  What a hospitable group of people, and a much larger turnout than I had expected.  My message on a flattening world, flattening information landscape, and flattening classrooms seemed to resonate quite well with them, and they were so very welcoming to this mono-lingual lug.  I also did sessions on blogging and podcasting, merely leading up to Apple gal Janet Hills much richer presentation on podcasting.  She’s a real geekster gadgeteer who puts on a very impressive show.  I did leave her envying me and my new Logitech wireless remote — with volume control. ;-) Later in the day, I sat in on Tom Welch’s presentation, Language Learning in a Flat World.  Welsh is a consultant from Kentucky and is doing a lot of work on 21st century skills, and doing some work in my own state.  He use to be a French teacher, so he definitely knew the lingo and the buttons.  Welsh started off with Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? video and then talked about how KFCs in China are out selling Mcdonalds.  The reason?  KFC has adapted their menu to appeal to the Chinese pallet.  I heard exactly the same thing in New Zealand, that KFC stores  have an architecture that is designed to appeal to the Maori and other Polynesian cultures.  This is also being blamed for increased obesity among Maoris. Welch also predicts a coming tsunami in education.  He attributes it to three already established and emerging factors:

1. The identification of standards (an agreement on the “product”)
2. The use of common end of course assessments (quality guarantee)
3. Technology (oportunities for learning 24/7/7 – on demand learning)

Because of my well published predisposition against standards-based education and high-stakes testing, and any emphasis on technology (for technology’s sake), I almost disregarded this list altogether and and quite nearly deleted it right after I typed it into my notes.  However, I continued to listen. As it seems, there is one more factor, that when stirred into this cauldron, could quite easily transform this concoction into something apocalypticly disruptive to the business of education.  Simply erase the Carnegie Unit, the unit of measure for American education, and kaboom. I didn’t get this at first, but as Tom continued to talk, it suddenly rushed over me like a fever.  When a principal is confronted with a group of students who need to learn organic chemistry, and she are thinking of the situation in terms of standards of knowledge and skill to be attained to a specific measurable degree, then the answer is not necessarily an automatic, “I need to find a chemistry teacher.”  The answer is, how am I going to cause that learning to take place, and her options extend well beyond just hiring a teacher.  I’m not jumping up and down with joy over this.  I haven’t rolled the stone around enough.  I suspect that I am going to have mixed feelings.  But I must admit that on of the products that I was especially interested in, in the exhibitor’s hall, was a service where you can hire a teacher in Peru to teach you Spanish via the Internet for $15 an hour. It’s got me scratching my head!

If I could think of a more superlative term to describe my experience at yesterday’s K12 Market Symposium, at MacWorld, I would use it. Cheers and applauds go to Mike Lawrence, the executive director of California CUE. He and his staff coordinated the event with MacWorld, the first educator strand in many years. They had so many attendees to register for the symposium that MacWorld had to move us into a larger hall. But what blew me away was the line-up of speakers that Mike brought in.

I started it off with a keynote. Same old thing, I’ve heard it before ;-) Then Hall Davidson, world class keynote speaker, is also a great presenter of nuts and bolts. He was his usually dynamic and very high energy self — very smart and quick. Davidson demonstrated some very basic, but compelling video production techniques. His invention, KitZu, certainly appears to have matured into something that all educators should be aware of and be using.

You go to the web site, select a subject area, and then download a kit labeled with a topic of interest. He picked sharks. After the download, you have a folder with image files, video files, and audio. These files can very easily be dragged and dropped into iMovie or Premiere on the PC, and then sequenced and voiced over to create an original video product. Kits learn, by producing something that teaches. “How cool is that?”

After lunch, I did my standard Podcasting presentation. I have to say that the jet lag had taken hold by that point, and frankly, I don’t remember much of what I said, so I hope I did good. We did record some input from the crowd, and perhaps I’ll have a podcast of that in the coming days or weeks.

That was followed by Carol Anne McGuire, whom I talked about in yesterday’s blog. I wrote during her presentation and posted it during my final session on Blogging as a demonstration. In retrospect, I think that what impressed me the most about Carol Anne’s presentation is that I expected to learn about utilizing features of computers to compensate for her students’ visual handicaps. Instead, it was about how technology made her children special.

Rae Niles told the story in her presentation about a class in one of her schools that was studying handicaps and especially blindness. There were no blind people in their small Kansas town, so the study was purely academic. But Rae knew Carol Anne, and arranged for her students to iChat into the Kansas classroom and to have the students talk together about the challenges of navigating a sighted world, and even some advantages that the blind children described.

Rae Niles, the next speaker, is a master story teller. She is the director of curriculum and technology in a 1:1 school district in Kansas. She says that the most obvious benefits of 1:1 is that attendance is up, Discipline issues are down, and the relationship between students and teachers has changed. But Rae told several stories about specific students who, before they had laptops, had been notable underachievers and a frequent source of disruption in their classrooms. But, when empowered by personal computers, their behaviors changed, their grades went up, and unique talents emerged that no one had seen before.

A few months ago, I podcasted a story that I had heard from an Apple rep at the state educational technology conference in Kansas. The story was about four boys, who interviewed a number of local residents about World War II, learning about the soldier train and how people would bring baked goods and fried chicken to Newton, Kansas, to hand to the soldiers as they rolled by on their way to the war. The four boys changed the focus of their video production in a way that illustrated that what they had learned was special, that they owned what they learned. Well, it happened in one of Rae Niles schools and she told that story yesterday. I certainly wish that I had known and could have recorded her telling. She is a unique talent that I think we’ll all be hearing a lot more of.

After closing the event with my standard blogging presentation, I thought back on the day, again thankful to Mike Lawrence for assembling such a powerful event. …And all I can think about is the tragic waste that we are allowing to happen in this country and world by not empowering all of our children to be their best. We need each other’s best right now, and we can afford to do it. We simply lack the vision and courage among our leaders. Come next November, here in the U.S., look for those characteristics in the people you vote for. We must stop looking backward, and start moving forward.

2¢ worth