As I reflect on this years ISTE conference a couple things come to mind.

WiFi:
A HUGE shout out to the organizers and the Convention Center. By far this has been the best WiFi access at any ISTE conference since I’ve been coming (this is my 5th). It was slow at times, but overall the ability to keep a connection running among 13,000+ geekie educators was very smooth. I hope it stays this way in the future.

iPads:
They were everywhere! I know they sold 2 million in the first two months, but I swear half of those were here at the conference! I’m not sure what the future holds for this device, but all I heard about was battery life, battery life, battery life! Looking forward to seeing how they are used in schools next year with students.

My first ISTE presentation:
This year I finally made it in the program and gave my first ever ISTE presentation. I hope it was useful to those who attended. You can find the handouts here along with the videos that people seemed to enjoy.

Conversations:
Once again I’ve been reminded on what’s the real reason we still fly to conferences like this. It’s for the conversations. Those planned like the ones at EduBloggerCon and those unplanned like the one’s we have here at Blogger’s Cafe. In the end, we like being with others in person, we like the human factor of sitting and chatting with those we learn from year round. I spent more time offline rather than online this conference just enjoying being here with others. I’m online with them the rest of the year…..I only get three days of being with them in person.

Where do we go?
I keep asking myself if anything has changed in the 5 years since I’ve started attending ISTE (NECC) conferences….and I’m not sure if anything has. There are more people hanging out at the Blogger’s Cafe, there are more blogging educators and that’s fantastic. But looking through the sessions I didn’t notice much of a change. There was no sessions on RSS this year, yet some educators I talked to who are attending for the first time had never heard of RSS.

The theme of “Mobile” and “Global” were prominent and I’m seeing the same trends in conferences around the world. Everyone is talking about mobile devices and how do we help students become more globally minded.

I believe it starts with teachers. We need more teachers to think globally. The tools are here, the ideas and lessons and connections are out there….now we just need to do it.

We need to help teachers to learn to reach (shameless self-promotion) out and create connections that they can bring back into their classrooms in supporting kids.

We can’t help students be globally minded if we are not globally minded ourselves.

So there’s your focus this year. How do you become or help others become more globally minded? How do we help students teach students the power of connecting and understand the networks that this new digital landscape is made of?

Those are the questions I’m walking away with this year from ISTE.

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.

Clarence Fisher and Jen Wagner brought this to my attention. Barbara Barreda, the principal of St. Elisabeth’s school has lost her house do to the wildfires in LA.

Two years ago a class at Barbara’s school skyped a class in Shanghai to talk about the differences between our schools and cities.

How global are we?

I didn’t even know there were wildfires going on in LA, yet I am able to give and help a friend in need and learn about the needs of others through the network.

A thanks to Clarence and Jen for bringing this to our attention. When a part of your network is in need it feels good to know you can help out in some small way.

Clarence and Jen have set up a paypal account to help Barbara out.

We have set up a paypal account
where every single penny will be given straight to Barbara to meet her
expenses. Currently she is staying with a friend but literally has the
clothes on her back and the few items she could throw into her car.

The power of the network

My mom and dad flew in on Dec. 14 for their first visit every to China. Of course I set up a blog for my mother so she could write about her experience and family members back home could follow their journey through Shanghai, Bangkok, and Beijing. It was a great two weeks of spending time off the grid. But I missed it (not sure if that is a good thing). The network is where my friends are. It’s the daily connections, the Skype chats, the reading and writing. That is what 2007 will be remembered as. For me it was the “Year of the Network”.

2007 saw networks flourish. Looking back to what I wrote last year (Jan. 4, 2007):

Today, I woke up looking forward to tackling the long list of e-mails that awaited me from my 2 weeks of being disconnected (OK, I checked e-mail twice while in Vietnam). I made it through 2 e-mails, but instead was part of 3 Skype chats, 2 Skype calls, 4 Google Chats, and 1 more Skpye call tonight. Is this 2007? The year when chat and VoIP take over the world, when e-mail finally does not do justice to the conversations we are having? If so I’m excited.

Little did I know then that I was talking about the learning network that would defined what 2007 was for me. It was the year of the network. The year of my Skype contact list becoming to long, having 400+ people on twitter, and trying to define the difference between a learning community and a learning network.

As I reflect back over the past year it’s been an interesting one both personally and professional. Leading me down a path that ultimately saw me resign from my current position for something “different” (yet to be defined). Does that mean a different school? A different job? Or something more like what Clay and Will write about? One thing that I do know is that it will be my network that will help me find what “different” is either directly or indirectly, I believe it will be the network that leads to my next road in life.

So that leaves me looking ahead to 2008. Not knowing what the future holds for me personally or professionally. I can feel it though. Like a rain storm coming on a hot summers day. The kind you can watch rolling in off the mountains and you smell the rain before it starts. Something is going to give in 2008, like the storm that sits over the mountains for days before unleashing it’s down pour, it is going to come.

Barbara Torris left a comment the other day that has had me thinking about what the future holds for education, learning, and networks. What is going to “tip us forward” in 2008 that we will be talking about a year from now?

I believe it has to do with the “Live Web” that Doc Searles talks about (via Will Richardson). If 2007 was the year of the network, then I believe 2008 will be the year of the “Live Web”.

I base this souly off my own experiences but here’s what I see happening on the web today.

Ustream.tv: I’ve been very impressed with this web site and its ease of use. Live video where anyone that wants to can have their own web channel. Ustream is just the beginning. In 2008 we’ll see more web sites like this start to pop up.

Podcasts: The edtechtalk network has been doing this for awhile. But I think we’re going to see an increase in live broadcasts on the web with an archive podcast. I’m still looking for the perfect app that will stream your podcast live and archive it as an mp3 at the same time…basically a ustream for audio files.

Of course live chat will become even more popular.  I host all my web sites at bluehost.com partly because they offer 24/7 chat support on their front page. I know I have instant access to live support when I need it. Part of the reason I bank with the bank I do is for live chat. From 9am-5pm Monday – Friday my bank offers free live chat service via their web site. Living overseas this has been a huge benefit knowing I can chat with someone from my bank and not pay long distance phone charges.

I believe we’ll continue to see an increase in these types of live on-demand applications. I can see credit card companies getting on board, more banks, etc. The streaming of live content will continue to evolve and I think we’ll see more schools using this as well. Live video of school sporting events. Live feeds from classrooms or presentation. Yes, 2008 is going to be different. There’s a storm brewing out there, I can smell it…..and I’m exciting to find where my place is in it!

[tags]networks, liveweb[/tags]

Technorati Tags: Live web, 2007, 2008, networks, docsearles, willrichardson, bluehost.com, skype

We’ve been living overseas now for 5 (going on 6) years. Every summer when we return on holiday we find that America has moved even farther into the digital age. I’ll never forget 2 years ago when we came home ran into Wal-Mart to grab something real quick went to check out and walked up to an automatic check out machine. We both looked at each other trying to figure out what to do. We put our groceries down in the wrong spot and it told us to remove them. My wife then scanned a bottle of wine and alarms went off (Note to self don’t use an auto checkout machine when buying alcohol) we then had to wait for a person to come check our ID. In the end we felt we had been thrown 5 years into the future (which coming from Saudi Arabia wasn’t real difficult).

Yesterday offered up yet another experience. I had the ScanDisk card from our digital camera and went to Target to run off some photos we had taken of friends and family. I wondered around Target for 5 minutes trying to find the photo shop with no luck. So I asked a helpful person in the electronic center.

“Is there a place I can print some digital pictures?”

Answer: “Not in the store. You have to go to target.com upload the pictures there and then you can pick them up here tomorrow.”

Part of me is saying “How cool is that” and the other part of me is saying “That sucks!”

So we head to Wal-Mart, where you can print off digital pictures but if you went to walmart.com uploaded your picture and picked them up the next day they were half the price.

As I sit here now writing this and thinking back…I can’t believe how fast things change and how this connected network is being used in so many different ways. I enjoy coming back to the States every summer just to see how things have changed, how the advancements in technology are changing our lives and how we as a society are being asked to adjust to these new tools and this new network.

[tags]networks[/tags]

Technorati Tags: networks, target, walmart