As usual I spent most of my time at the Blogger’s Cafe chatting with new and old friends alike.

I did go to one session yesterday. Scott McLeod’s session on disruptive innovations.

Now I went to the session to support Scott and to hear what he had to say, but really I could have found the content he was presenting on the web at his K12online presentation.

We talk about how content is out there, how if you want to, you can find the content. So why do we come to this conference? If the content that is presented here is accessible anywhere anytime what’s the reason we’re here?

What’s the reason we come together face to face?

I’ve talked about this before on the blog and I keep coming back to this idea that when we gather at a conference like this, or in a classroom, that the conversation, the relationships, are what we are looking for.

One of the reasons educators give for virtual schools being bad is that students will loose that social connection….I’ve never heard a teacher say, “But they’ll lose the content”.

Yet, we build conferences around content not connections…about hour long sessions and not about the socialization of being together……and we’re suppose to be the most connected of the educators out there. We are suppose to be the ones who “get it” and yet we see conferences as content not as human connections.

There is a reason we come together face to face. We are social animals we want the social connections.

That’s why I spend most of my time hanging out in the Blogger’s Cafe. That’s were the social connections are made, the conversations that I have here cannot happen on the web…they are organic, they are real, they are friends new and old.

It’s getting the opportunity to meet Leo and Sachi LeFever from CommonCraft. Or the Co-founders of VoiceThread. It’s these connections that bring us together.

Does the same apply to our classrooms?

Should our classrooms be planned around conversations rather than around content?

How do we make this change?

Technorati Tags: NECC09, NECC, NECC2009, conversations

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First I think we need to understand how I view my job and what I think the job of an educational technologist should include.

First and foremost we are educators. Our job is to educate. Our students range in age from 60+ to less than 5 years old. Our mission is to teach them how to use technology to learn, create, be more productive or make a task easier. The only way we can do that is to have a solid understanding of what is out there, that tools exist both as part of the computer’s operating system and on the web that allow us to do our job easier, to learn differently, or connect us to people, thoughts, ideas that we never had access to before.

Our job….is to explore!

Our job….is to understand!

Our job…is to motivate!

Our job…is to change habits!

Our job…is to support!

Our job…(leave your thoughts in the comments)

So when Dan asked the question yesterday:

How do we keep from continually dividing/splitting off conversations?

Answer: You can’t! You can’t control the web, you can’t keep the conversation from splitting into different parts; into niches. That’s what the web is so good ate. Yes….having one big conversation would be great…but at the same time overwhelming. The splitting of conversations on the web allows each individual to choose the conversation they want to follow (aka network). On Twitter for example, you follow the conversations you want. You create your niche (or personal) network on Twitter. You don’t want to hear about the group around dogs….or maybe you do. Only you can decide that. Twitter allows the conversations to be split. We see it in the use of Nings as well. There is a Ning site for almost any niche in education. Sure we could all benefit from one large Ning, but then again…it would be to “noise” for me and I wouldn’t be able to find my place.

I don’t have the answers…but whereas I realize we need to be using
multiple tools as technologists, that is not such an easy sell to get
faculty, teachers, instructors on board with using yet more tools…

And this is the ultimate role of the educational technologiest. Our job is to know all of…or as many as we can…tools that can be used to further learning. Our job is to understand how these tools and technologies can be used so that teachers don’t have to.

We can’t give the tools to people when they don’t need them…there first needs to be a need for the tool.

The first question I ask any teacher is: “What do you want students to learn?” The second question is “What’s your idea to get there?”

As the teacher is talking, I (and maybe this is just me) can start to visualize what tool they are talking about. They might not be talking about a technology at all, but I can usually visualize a digital tool that can reach the outcome they are after through their idea.

Start with the idea and apply the tool.

If you start with the tool first…you have a lesser chance of effecting learning. This happens to me quite often. A teacher will come to me and say “I want to blog.”

OK, that’s great, but why? What are you thinking? Why do you want to blog? What do you know about a blog?

From there I try and understand what the teacher wants to do, what is the outcome they are looking for. Maybe it is a blog that is best, maybe what they really want is a wiki, or just to use Inspiration.

My point….don’t try to control the conversation on the web. Don’t try to control the learning in the classroom. Allow the thoughts and ideas to control where you go. You can’t force conversations to happen in a certain spot or in a certain way. You have to be able to build a place for conversations to happen. As an educational technologiest you have to be able to understand the tools and be able to teach those tools, apply those tools, and support those tools within your school. The more you know, the more powerful you become as a resource for teachers and students.

Don’t just learn blogs, wikis, and twitter…learn all of it! Your a technology person…go out there and learn it all! And by that I mean get yourself a network of like minded folks that know it for you. You can’t know it all…but you can build yourself a network that will know more collectively than you will ever be able to learn as an individual.

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1. Twitter a different conversation
2. The changing landscape of blogging
3. Virtual Teacher’s Lounge

What happened? Where did all the links go?

Don’t worry…I have a theory…here me out.

First of all please do not think that I am all hung up on my ranking within the edublog community. No, I just find the whole thing fascinating. So here’s my thought.

Technorati Authority is based on the incoming links to your blog over the past 6 months. Meanings every day you drop a day and add a day to maintain your 6 months of incoming links. From that and some other data like who those links are coming from it figures out what your Authority is.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

So why over the past 6 months have I seen a falling tend in my authority ranking?

First…it’s not just me.

Using Scott McLeod’s Top 50 P-12 Edublogs posted in June 2008. I went back to see how other blogers authority rankings have been doing.

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: June 2008=550         Nov 2008=430

2 Cents Worth: June 2008=559          Nov. 2008=404

Stephen’s Web: June 2008=708     Nov. 2008=620

Weblogg-ed: June 2008=897      Nov. 2008=604

Dangerously Irrelevant: June 2008=413     Nov. 2008=310

What the heck happened? Why, across the board everyone has dropped in authority?

So I started thinking…what happened about 6 to 8 months ago that changed? What happened to bloggers and blogging? Why are there less people linking to blog posts and reflecting on them? Has the writing gotten worse? Or has something changed?

One word!

Like it or not Twitter has changed the way we communicate. Twitter has taken all those links that we use to put on our blogs and has shifted them to a different place, to a new conversation.

I’m just as gulity as the next twitterer. I use to blog about good posts that I found. Now I just write: Great post from @? you have to read this http://?????

As I bounced this theory off of Kim and Chrissy over the last couple days it made more sense. Kim recalls going to NECC in Atlanta (two years ago) where there were only a hand full of us twittering. (There’s a picture somewhere of me hacking a flatscreen to put twitter on a TV at the blogger’s cafe). That was about 24 months ago. I would say somewhere around 10 to 12 months ago the dam broke and twitter for educators hit mainstream. Somewhere around 8 to 10 months ago educators started to shift the conversation. Started using twitter as a place for links and personal conversations and blogs became the well thought out personal posts.

Start looking at blog posts. Very few anymore refer to something another blogger wrote. Most link to a blogger about something they did, a project they are working on together, but very few blog posts reflecting on what other bloggers wrote.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I just think the landscape of what blogging is, is changing.

Add to that the fact that bloggers are blogging less because they are twittering more we end up with less blog content to actually read and link to therefore once again driving down the links coming and leaving blogs.

So where does this all lead?

Teacher: “So should I start a blog, or get involved in Twitter?”

Answer: Both!

Related posts:

1. When blogging catches on in schools!
2. Teachers as blogging models
3. Blogging, Classrooms, Clarence

2. Once you are prepared for the work, double the time you think it will take, multiple that by two, and then you might be close.

3. Always remember you are doing this to better education (or educators) or so you hope.

___________________

It’s the day before the conference starts and big thanks to my Principal and ISB for giving me the week off to be here in Shanghai to finish planning for the conference. I really don’t know how I would have done it otherwise.

There are about 6 main organizer and then about another 6 helping us out on the ground. We have a total of about 550 people coming if we include everyone even the 60+ middle school and high school students who will be helping out with tech support.

It’s been a crazy conference and at the last planning meeting we found ourselves about 100 people over what we were expecting.

We started looking for more presenters and before I knew what had happened, everyone was looking at me.

Hence I’m now doing three presentations. If that’s not bad enough they’ve put me in the same sessions with the rest of our invited guess (OK, I did have some say in that part).

Now, it’s an honor to be considered to present along with the invited guests, and at the same time trying to organize and present at the same conference is not recommended.

But here I find myself the day before the conference scrambling to create/remix some presentations.

I’m doing three:

I just love this picture of my opening talk on why we’re thinking differently. It’s a talk/discussion on the theory behind what is pushing us into this new way of learning. It’s based a lot on George Siemen’s work (who was suppose to be here but couldn’t make it). Educators seem to like it as it gives them a frame to try and understand that we (technology people) are not just pushing this stuff because we like it, but because it’s our world today.

My other two presentations are down and dirty stuff that educators can take with them.

From Print to Digital: Learning to Write for the Web

10 Digital Tools for Digital Educators

I’m really excited about the 10 Digital Tools presentation. Our presentation times are only 45 minutes long. This session looks to introduce 10 tools, and then allow educators to use the 7 unconference sessions to learn more about the tools they might find helpful in their classrooms.

Many people have commented on the 45 minute time slots as not being enough time. As presenters I think when you are at a conference like this that honors conversations over presentations you have to rethink what it means and how you engage people. Use the unconference times to extend your thinking. Hit them with something hard and deep, and then take the 5 hours we give you to engage in conversations around your presentation.

Yes it’s short, but we are not looking for a sage on the stage, we’re looking for facilitators of thought and learning.

It’s a switch. It’s the same switch we have asked teacher to make, and now as a conference we’re asking conference goers and presenters to make that switch as well.

This is all “Beta” of course, but that’s what teaching and learning is suppose to be in this day in age right? We don’t have all the answers, heck this whole conference format might not work, but then again………

Ready or not……it’s time to change!

Related posts:

1. Learning 2.0 conference Shanghai
2. Learning 2.008 Conference and EdubloggerCon Shanghai
3. Conversations with Wetpaint

Here’s a taste of the new image:

Read the rest here.

[tags]conversations, blogs, 21st Century Learning[/tags]

Technorati Tags: blogs, conversations, 21st Century Learning, techlearning

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Monday I couldn’t keep the boys off of it. Every time I turned around
someone had it open and was playing it. So I took a step back into the
corner of the room and just watched (Seriously…I went and stood in
the corner!) I watched as they slowly opened the game back up and
started playing, I observed them, watching their actions and
interactions with the game:

“You made this level?”
“Yep!”
“How’d you do that?”
“There’s a level builder you can download and create your own levels for the game.”

That was it, my in. So I went to the kid who made the level and as I approached the game got minimized.

“Bring that back up…you made this?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you do it?”
“You just download the level builder and place the different markers
where you want them. The trick is placing them perfectly so that you
don’t have to even move your guy…he just bounces off these and misses
those and wins all by himself…that’s how I created this one anyway.”
“How long did this take you?”
“Oh, about 4 hours.”
“So, could we download this level builder here at school and create
levels and release the game on teentek with teentek levels?”
“I guess, the cool part is the file is only 1.65mb. There are 1000s of
levels here and the file is still that small, isn’t that amazing?”
“Yeah, that is amazing?”
“What kind of licensing is on the game?”
“I’ll check that Mr. U.” another student says as they run off to grab a laptop.
“It’s freeware and it says on the web site ‘distribute like hell’.”
“OK, so why don’t you teach these other guys how to create levels and we’ll try to release the game next week.”
“SWEET!” with wide eyes

That was Monday. Today I had two other students approach me. One wants
to make a game that teaches you how to kill spam on your
computer. The other is a skateboarding game. What’s the learning
happening here? Is there any? How about the engagement with technology?

[tags]gaming, conversations, teentek[/tags]

Technorati Tags: Gaming, Education, learning

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