2¢ Worth

The folks at Teaching Tips, who provide a fairly eclectic arrangement of resources and information for teachers, has just pasted 50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers.

Blogging is becoming more and more popular in the classroom. Teachers can blog to stay in touch with parents and students or they can incorporate blogs from all of the students as a learning tool. The beauty of the student blog is that children from Kindergarten to high school can blog. No matter how you use blogs in your classroom, these tools will help you get started, enhance your experience, or bring the students into the fun.

The categories include:

• Where to Create Your Blog,
• Blogging Tools and Help for Teachers,
• General Blog Tools,
• Blogging and Internet Safety, and
• Getting Students in on the Action

I was gratified to see Class Blogmeister at the head of the list, though I continue to worry about the increasing number of users — over 160,000 now.  Users have noticed a buckling of the service over the past few days, which was a surprise, given that this is an off season for all of my services. 

Working with the techs a Rackspace, who hosts my servers, we discovered that one of them was undergoing a “denial of service” attack.  They blocked the attacker IP and set up monitors to guard against continued or future attacks.  It seems that there are people out there who illegally install software on unprotected web sites that are designed to launch attacks against randomly selected servers.  If they can break the server (which they were not able to do with CB), and they can do it consistently, then they will notify you, anonymously, and extort money in return for letting your server alone.  Insidious.

Anyway, these 50 Usefuls are pretty comprehensive, and I look forward to scanning through them.

Still at the music conference.  Jim Frankel is demo’ing and playing videos of a number of new music technologies.  I’m loving it!

But he just showed us a video of SoundBeam.  It’s currently only available in the UK, but you basically aim two ultrasonic sensors at a person, and their motions make music.  What blew my mind was when he showed a severely handicapped boy, making music by swaying around.

I would be hard for me to remember seeing anyone with that much joy!

I’m speaking at the Pennsylvania Music Educators’ Association annual conference today.  Actually, I’m at the front table now, waiting for people to start filing in.  The high point, though, will be Jim Frankel, of SoundTree, who will show some really cool music tech.  He just showed me a Korg Kaossilator.  Basically, its a flat surface, where you set the scale you want and then just start touching and dragging your finger across the surface to make tones and rythms.  You can even record parts, and then play on top of those, record, and keep playing.  An orchestra at your finger tips, and you can do it on the plane.  I gotta get me one of those.

As you can imagine, I’ve been struggling with this presentation.  They want literacy and today’s kids, but I want to take another stab at describing a balance between STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and the creative arts.  I’ve beat this drum before here, but I think that the language for describing this compellingly is still out there.

I finished up the presentation yesterday, all except for the final slide.  I tried making STEM AND MAD (music, art, & drama) into a meaningful anogram, but the best I could come up with was DAMNED ANT.  No good!

Finally, this morning, I settled on:

STEM without the creative arts, is just machinery!

..because the creative arts are the language of the 21st Century.

How would you close it?  Where is the balance?

It seems that those nostalgia launching questions that start with, “Remember when…” become an increasingly bandied topic with folks, as they get on past their first half-century of life. “Remember when we lived without air conditioning, and we didn’t seem to get hot?” I said to a cab drive just the other day. Of course I couldn’t imagine living without the AC now.

Ever think about what our children will wonder how they lifted without, when they’re over 50? Could be smart cloths.

New fabrics are being developed that can regulate body temperature, conduct electricity, play music, fight bacteria and odor, repel insects, soothe dry skin and have the capacity to custom shape themselves for your body.

Read more about it in this Auburn University Plainsman article, Smart Cloths Revolutionize Attire.

I’m home for a day, but it’s the entire day, thanks to a marathon drive from Wildwood, NJ, down the Delmar and then across the Raleigh, where I walking into the bed room just after mid-night.  Mostly, I’m catching up on e-mail and preparing for a keynote I’ll be delivering at the Pennsylvania Music Educators Conference in State College on Monday.  Don’t ask me to explain — by I’m really struggling over what to talk about.

Anyway, I took a quick detour over to my aggregator and ran across this Karen Ellis post in the Educational CyberPlayGround.

Educational CyberPlayGround? - Statistics:

I don?t know if anyone has told you this today, but your company is lucky to have you. You bring a unique set of skills to the work you do,you?re invested in the success of your employer, and - let?s face it - you spend a good deal of your time within their four walls. So of course you should be compensated. And fairly, at that. The BLS Compensation Calculator is an interactive tool that provides hourly wages for a particular type of job, in a particular place, with a particular level of experience. Special Issues Index, you might try the JobStar Salary Guide, which provides links to salary surveys online across numerous industry headings.

Other statistics generators she points to in the post include Tax Stats and Intercountry Adoption Statistics.  Learn more at Karen’s blog post.

OK!  This is not good.  It seems that the only time that I’m finding myself able to reflect on things, independent of making sure that yesterday worked and that today will accomplish what I want, is after only a few hours of sleep — between the hours of 1:00 and 2:00 AM.  Sad!

This morning, I woke up struggling with the outcome of an activity that Kevin Jarrett and I worked through with the mostly ed administrators in our workshop yesterday, The Future of Technology & Learning.  It was, a process that we put folks through as a lead-in to an afternoon conversation about 21st Century Skills.  I’ve done it before, and I may have blogged about it.

We asked the audience to watch the video, EPIC 2015, a documentary about the history of information between 1989 and 2015.  We asked them to watch it with their current 5th graders in mind, as they will be graduating in 2015.  The documentary, of course, becomes speculative after 2005, which was when this version of the video was made.

Then we spend just a few minutes airing out what concerned us about a GoogleZon world (you’d have to see the video) and then sent them to my Twitter-style chat program where we gave them one question to answer, “What do you hope your current 5th graders will know, when they graduate in 2015?”

What do you hope they know? What do you hope they can do with what they know? What do you hope they care about?

The aim was content, but I gave no more instruction than that question.

After about five minutes we asked them to answer, in the chat, “What do you hope your 2015 graduates can do with what they know?”

Here the aim was information skills.  But again, we only asked the question — no more explanation than that.

Finally, we asked, “What do you hope your 2015 graduates care about?”

I purposely wanted to give them the questions one at a time, so that they would consider the answers independent of the next question.  After they answered the questions in the Twitter-style chat, I transfered their answers to a Wiki.  We then asked each table of participants to scan through the answers and pull out, and/or rewrite, three answers to share with the entire group, each table concentrating on only one of the questions.

What seemed odd was that no one seemed able to answer to question one (content) without including some information skill.  And then, no one seemed able to answer question number two (skills) without including some form of value system.  And by the time we got to question three (What do you hope they care about?), it had all been said.

I told them then that there was a blog in this.  I didn’t know what, but I felt that there was some unified field theory to what we were seeing.  It christalized this morning — perhaps as much as anything can christalize at 1:10 AM.

2? Worth!

One of the most intriguing presentations that I saw at the Games+Learning+Society Conference last week, was partly a replay from last year’s conference.  It was delivered by Erica Halverson and Richard Halverson (don’t know their relation), and their delivery was fun.  They’ve been researching fantasy sports, looking for the whys and ways that people learn while playing their teams against each other. 

I really don’t understand the endeavor, other than you bid for players (playing cards), and then play your teams statistically against each other.  Strategies vary, and they told of at least one professional baseball team that successfully carried over some of what they learned about playing/working the statistics into their field game strategies.

The construct that Halverson and Halverson suggested is an interplay between what you know about the sport (fan knowledge) and what you’ve learned in your real world experiences (prior knowledge).  In a way, it is about investing your passion along with related prior knowledge to theorize and test strategies.  What pressed itself on me the most was the sense of investment, putting elements of yourself into the experience.

How might we tap into this in school.  Probably not by passing out sports playing cards, though I suspect folks have found some inventive and effective ways to use them in math class.  But what else might we be able to call “Fan Culture,” that could be applied in schools.

In a sense it happened at the conference as they ran a competition for game developers, where teams were challenged to create the best game during the two days of the event.  They are fans, or else they wouldn’t be there, and they were bringing their own, largely self-developed skills as programmers, strategists, and content specialists together with a newly launched game development system. 

There was a similar story in Sundays News & Observer, about a competition, here in Raleigh that challenged contestants to create a new business over the weekend.  Some of the concepts were amazingly innovative. Halverson and Halverson seemed to be pointing to the competition as the motivation for learning, but I think that there is probably more to it than that. 

Ooops!  There’s the Cape May light house.  I guess I’d better get on down to the car, so I can drive it off, when the ferry touches ground.

I am in that very sweet place between making it through a particularly onerous writing deadline and my next project, the New Jersey ELITE summer conference.  The problem is that most everyone else, along my longitude of the planet is in deep Delta sleep.  It’s OK, I’m looking forward to the day, with a canceled flight, I’m making my customary drive across Northeastern North Carolina on highway 258, then number 13 up through Portsmouth and Norfolk, across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel to the Delmar Peninsula, and on up the very rural and easy drive to Lewes, Delaware.  There I drive onto the Cape May Ferry, for an 80 minute cruise to the southern tip of New Jersey.  Then it’s just a few minutes to Wildwood, where I’ll be participating in a conference for NJ school administrators.

Now that I’m at the computer, let me spend a little mental energy, and then I can get back to sleep.  I want to reflect on the learning experiences I’ve had recently, digest them grow — or is it glow.  I remember at one point during the recent Games+Learning+Society Conference, I felt like my brain was glowing from the ideas I was being exposed to, pushing the wiring in my head to re-circuit itself.

I just glanced through the first few notes that I took during that conference and was struck by something that Jim Gee said in the opening panel, about game play being the antithesis of how we traditionally do schooling.  In game play, its the job of the gamer, as learner, examine the environment and rules of the game, the role of the gamer, and then to form a theory for how you’re going to play it.  You have to construct a strategy that follows that theory.  Then you test it, assess success, adjust the theory, adapt the strategy, and work it again.  I suspect that this is closer to the way that we’ve learned what we needed to know for adult work life, than the “being taught to” style of learning that we experienced in our own schooling.

Another idea that jumped at me from my notes was something that Cory Ondrjka, one of the founders of Second Life^TM, said.  He said that as we try to plan for and retool for the future, “..we’re going to get it wrong.  We’re not good a predicting the future.  Change is exponential, and our incorrect guesses are incrementally wrong.”

My guess is that we need to identify those fundamental element that we know are true about the future, and focus on those.  Teaching kids how to blog, use GPS, and construct a wiki, although all valuable activities, they are not about preparing children for the future.  What it’s about is helping children learn to teach themselves within a dynamic, digital, abundant, and connected information landscape.  I know I’ve left something out here, but I suspect I’m ready for sleep.

Look for photos on flickr, tagged with NJELITE08journey.

I’ve already been home for a full day, after a late but sure return from Madison and the Games+Learning+Society Conference last week.  I’ll have much to write about that later, but my main (and only) regret is not getting to see Stephen Downes opening presentation, which he apparently gave from the stairwell of his hotel in the Canary Islands.

However, I am focused, at present, on upcoming work in Wildwood, New Jersey.  I have a fairly long relationship with NJELITE, having been invited to present and help facilitate workshops for their annual administrators conferences at the Wildwoods Convention Center.  It is a treat for me, because I get to work with some fantastic professionals, see fabulous presenters and leaders, and I get to stay in the very lovely Candlelight Bed & Breakfast.

Last year, the conference opened with Daniel Pink (I’m currently reading The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, thanks to Vicki Davis).  This year, I’ll finally get to see and meet David Pogue.  It was on a train between New York and New Haven Connecticut, a couple of years ago, that I almost got to meet him, but I lacked the nerve.

Perhaps the best part of this years event will be the opportunity to work with Kevin Jarrett, AKA KJ Hax.  Kevin and I will be facilitating a strand together called “The Future of Technology and Learning.”  This is candy to me, and we’ve been working on a plan via Skype and together at NECC and GLS.  I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and there is going to be a lot of chance for conversation.

It’s also given me a chance to play around a bit more with Ning, fleshing out my profile.  I’m still rolling this social networking thing around, and increasingly coming to believe that the profile is the real power for making this work.  Not sure how, but…

This is a live blog transcript of the session I’m attending at the Games+Learning+Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.