One from ISTE2014, more to come

Hey, all,

Just back from #ISTE2014 in lovely Atlanta, GA and I'll be reviewing and sharing over the next couple weeks here. In many ways it was the best ISTE ever. I've been going to them since it was called NECC and actually my first one was in Atlanta back in 2000. This was my twelfth conference, since I missed a couple for family vacation conflicts and such, but I'll certainly pick up lucky 13 in Philly come summer 2015.

There have been many changes, many of them recently since the coming on board of CEO Brian Lewis. I tend to be a positive sort, so I swing with them. My friend Peggy Sheehy bent both my ears for nearly a half hour the other day actually reading aloud the loud rant she recently posted on her blog. So there are definitely dissenting voices. I share with Peggy the intense disappointment in not being able to connect with friend David Warlick this year--that left a hole in my ISTE experience--but I share my admiration for Brian and the job he is doing with what I believe is the vast majority of ISTE members. I do believe that Peggy has some insightful points about not throwing out the experienced babies with the ISTE bath water. You see where you stand.

So there. Do read that letter: It completely captures the firebrand that is Peggy Sheehy.

But to the purpose of my post today. Gord Holden's wonderful presentation at our Online Learning Network's (formerly SIGOL) one-hour-with-11-educator "Extravaganza" this past Sunday in Atlanta experienced some technical difficulties that we were not able to sufficiently rectify in our short time. In particular, Skype took over my audio settings and would neither yield them to video or use audio itself. Then the projector refused to display my laptop image, deciding instead to show a screensaver not displaying on my laptop monitor. Though we did share with some who stayed past our one hour, I posted Gord's PowToon video this morning at ISTE Connects so that it might find a broader audience. I reshare here to broaden its audience at least a bit further. Watch for more reflections on ISTE 2014 in the days to come.

Here's Gordon's

Virtual Teaching and Learning Starts with Quest Atlantis

I'm going to begin journaling my personal experiences with Quest Atlantis here in order that I might pull out perhaps publishable bits for print later on. So stay tuned here (and I may cross-post at Oh! Virtual Learning) for that. This is an exciting time for me and I hope to share it prodigiously.

It's been interesting this past year, learning about and experiencing the powerful way that immersion into a 3 dimensional internet experience (3Di) can lead to engaged learning. Most notably, I think of Peggy Sheehy's powerful presentation at the Second Life Educational Community Conference in Tampa, a gathering about which I've already blogged, and I'd also send you to Fleep Tuque's marvelous roundup at her blog, Fleep's Deep Thoughts. Funny, I use Second Life names and "rl" (real life) names interchangeably. Fleep is Chris Collins "irl" (in real life) and Peggy is Maggie Marat. I noticed in Tampa that folks tended to lean toward addressing one another using avatar names. There's a Masters thesis in there somewhere, ya'll--the whole issue of identity extension into digital realms. Thankfully, I don't have to write it here.

Peggy is THE pioneer in leading young students into immersive learning experiences via 3Di in the Second Life Teen Grid. This is a realm I have never visited, since I've as of yet failed to hook myself into a project, a required criteria for approval for adult entry into the TG. I hope to progress into the TG, and after listening to some of the success stories at the SLEDCC, I have every faith that I will. Meanwhile, I'm beginning my foray into VE with Quest Atlantis. The journey looks promising.

Quest Atlantis is a 3Di environment that has been working with students and teachers on a global scale since 2004. The extensive website that supports the teaching and learning states "Over the last four years, more than 10,000 children on five continents have participated in the project." I was introduced to it years ago and never got around to really digging in, that is until my relatively new friend Jeff Agamenoni, a teacher of special needs middle schoolers in Great Falls, Montana, needled me to investigate it.

Jeff's another story altogether. I met Jeff in Second Life, when he sought me out to add his new blog, "From Mr. A to Mr. Z" to the ISTE Island Blogger's Hut, a facility I maintain for the International Society for Technology in Education in Second Life. His avatar, Henny Zimer (that's "zymer," with a long "y," for those audial learners in the readership). We became friends. We Skype occasionally, twitter back and forth, and generally co-explore new technologies, especially social ones, together. We share a fascination with the new ways technologies are flattening the globe, and I respect his opinions, fresh as they are with the eyes of a newcomer to the field.

First Steps
I visited the QA website. I clicked on the "Educators" tab. I checked out the Professional Development (PD) schedule, and was appalled to see that qualifying for QA participation requires teachers to spend a month learning about the platform. PD sessions run weekly, about 2 hours a week, in the evening. I immediately set about trying to perform the equivalent of "testing out" of the training, sending an email to the website managers stating my prior experience with the 3Di, my various statuses as blogger (SL blog, contributor to the "official" Second Life Education blog), and my newly hatched LLC, MUVErs, dedicated to helping education and the 3Di "play well" together.

I received a prompt and polite response that I had to do the PD.

A little huffy, I thought to myself, well, I don't have time for that. My Google calendar, by the way, is pretty much a nightmare. My lovely wife, Lee Ann, and I have weekly meetings to make sure we're on the same page about our commitments, personal, familial, and professional; and it doesn't help that process much that I have two paying jobs--one as Lower School Technology Coordinator at University School of Nashville and one as "Teacher-in-residence" at the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach--and a start-up company that's currently knee-deep into high stakes negotiations with a large Mid-west America university system to help provide 3Di simulations for online learning. "NO WAY," was my thought.

Then one day last week I was inspired by an online conversation with Jeff to go look at the schedule again. I spent a bit more time at the QA website and complained to him that I'd missed the first in the September training sessions. He encouraged me to register for the rest, saying that he'd missed the first of his sessions but since it was basically introduction to VE, he was sure I could do the same. Here comes the nail in the coffin (perhaps an analogy with undue negative connotations, but such a graphic one I can't help but resort to it). I twittered a question:

Who wants to partner with me in Quest Atlantis training? 2 hours each Wed. Oops, there goes my audience, LOL

I did not expect any reply.

I went about my work irl. In a few minutes, I checked my tweets. The usual suspects had posted random, often helpful and informative thoughts, including this one.

@scottmerrick I do I do I do! 08:54 AM September 16, 2008 from web in reply to scottmerrick

It was from Peggy Sheehy, MaggieMarat on twitter, and my dear friend. Maggie, btw, was one of my 8 co-presenters in last summer's "SLedupotential: Educational Potentials of Second Life and Virtual Environments" at NECC2008 in San Antonio. Like quite a few friends I've met in Second Life and grown to know irl, Maggie/Peggy feels to me like a childhood friend never lost. What did I call her, a "dear friend?" I mean that. Later, friend Malinda McCormick (Joie Despres in Second Life) replied with a query about which session I was registering for. I hope that means that she'll join us! Malinda and I are "pagemates," a joking reference to our sharing a page in ISTE's "Leading and Learning with Technology" print and online publication this past summer as featured members of that 85,000 member international organization.

This may be time for a little aside. This is another Masters thesis topic, the strong bonds created by individuals who first meet "virtually," or "online," and then get to know one another personally and professionally and form amazingly strong relationships in both domains, maybe many domains. I will hypothesize here that the relationships are forged by common interests and predelections, not a half-bad way to start relationships, and further that these beginnings would never have happened at all without the mediating technology of the 3Di. Educational sage David Warlick and I have become friends for the very same reason, as he noted in a Skype chat with my teacher participants in 2007's Web2.0forUS! workshop: "Scott and I are not friends because of our geographical proximity. We are friends because of our ideas." I have never had so much as a cup of coffee with David. But when we meet irl he greets me like an old friend. I feel greeted and I return that greeting. I feel priveliged to know him, as well as to be known by him. That's what friendship is, or at least what supports it. It's powerful.

I must get back to my little journal.

Okay, well, tonight at 7 pm my time I will login to Quest Atlantis, using a new username, MisterMerrick, and my password that I set when I confirmed my participation in the teacher PD program, and I'll fire up Skype and get a voice connection with Bronwyn Stuckey, a teacher who leads QA PD from her home in Australia. The journey begins.

More later :)

Epic 2015

David Warlick and Kevin Jarrett put together what must've been a stellar experience for "mostly ed administrators" built around a 2005 video from the Museum of Media History. I saw this video at an Ian Jukes presentation a couple years ago at a NECC, I believe in San Diego, and lost its location. It's so thought provoking, as is David's blogpost here, as well as Kevin's collection of them here, that I just have to share it all out. To get you into your weekend, or whatever day it is (thanks to the asynchronous magic of blogs:), give it a watch. What do you think?

Epic2015 from AlbinoBlackSheep

Learning and Leading with Technology comment published

My reply to comments on the topic, "Is Chatspeak Destroying English?" was published in this month's Learning and Leading with Technology, a print magazine that goes out to the 85,000plus members of ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education. I don't often respond to the occasional calls for comment, but I felt pretty strongly about this one. (Possibly mis-)Quoting David Warlick, "Our students are communicating competently with the tools that are part of their daily lives. We take those tools away as they enter our schools. What's wrong with this? Everything."

From Learning & Leading with Technology February 2008

I wrote:
No More Than Rock ‘N’ Roll

The fact that modern digital communicants
utilize chatspeak is no more
destroying English than rock ‘n’ roll
destroyed music (though rap may
yet--LOL). Savvy humans nuance
their language style according to its
effectiveness, and I’d wager that formal
English will always have its place (Probs).
Scott Merrick
University School of Nashville and
Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach
Nashville, Tennessee

I'm Catching Up

Or not. I'm actually finally getting to my Netvibes after a very busy day at work and then at home. I've been treated in the last 15 minutes to (via Netvibes) David Warlick's opinion-challenging commentary on pedagogy and Alex Courosa's (via Twitter) provocative slides for his Web 2.0 pressie. I love, btw, David's occasional typos and grammatical boo-foos: They remind me 1) that he's in the moment when he posts and 2) that he's human--the man works 'way harder than anyone should have to...

The conversation is about the value of pedagogy, or what Clay Burell calls "schooliness" in the service of learning. What do you think? Be bold. Talk to us...

Here's Alex's slideshow:

View Upload your own

My RSS Feeds on Education are Achieving Consensus!

Interesting, or at least it is to me...

I use Netvibes to aggregate my RSS feeds. It's a cool tool that I would love to share with you, so here it goes on my list of "to be created" instructional videos. More on that later.

Meanwhile, I have been struck this week with how posts from so many of the education-related bloggers I follow (or "arse"=RSS, according to one particular German-British friend of mine) via my Netvibes interface are reflecting rather dramatically on how they are personally striving to re-examine the relevance of their own teaching practices, toward incorporating social networking, Web 2.0, and as-yet-unimagined new technology tools rekindle the relevance of education.

Vicki Davis, "coolcatteacher" blogger, starts with a poem, and cross-posts at the TechLearning bloggers' outlet. She argues that blogging is not the "death of writing," as many old garde have argued, but its evolution, and continues, warning about changes to come, that "...as we move forward to a society that can send and receive education any place any time from anyone, the best teachers will become SuperTeachers and the worst schools, districts, and teachers may find themselves completely without a job."

Sandy Wagner, "Ed Tech Administrator" blogger and head of a 5000 student school district in western NY, describes a student panel whose work resulted in his realization that "our students had anywhere from 60 to 600 contacts on their 'friends' lists. They are spending upwards of two hours a day communicating using these tools. More importantly, students said they would like to be able to contact teachers using these tools."

Jeff Whipple, prolific commentator at his "Whip Blog, musings about technology and education," points out challenges by writing, "Certainly the ability to build a global learning / work network will be a valuable tool in the next few years. My concern lies in the methods students used to generate traffic. Global citizenship will require not just connectedness, but value to that connectedness. Students soon found that more traffic can be generated by questionable content that content of redeeming social value. What do they learn from this? Where do we start the discussions of digital citizenship when the biggest library is but a click away from the world’s largest arcade, the world’s largest “TV/movie/music” store and the world’s largest porn shop?" I discovered Whipple's post, which you can read here (and should, since it talks about one educator's use of social networking to measure their grade by traffic on their websites) via David Warlick's commentary on it at David's 2Cents Worth blog.

It's all interconnected, ya'll. It's all common sense. It's not just some "kool-aid" radical trend. It's the way things are going. As Vicki opines, we are the teachers, we are in the best positions to help our students cope with what Ian Jukes calls "information overload." Let's all go out of the locker room, onto the playing field, and make a difference--one infused with kindness and love of learning...

Happy Holidays to you all, and to all a good day...

The "Big Conversation"

I thunk anyone interested in what I thunk might be interested in this, the first draft for an Enrichment Team newsletter I drafted tonight. I rewrote it for submission (interesting term) to my administration, then more or less completely rewrote it before I sent it off. But this forum is larger and I have faith it can absorb the first draft. Interestingly enough, or not, the print newsletter-posted article may lead people here. Ah what a tangled internet we weave! Here goes...


The "Big Discussion"
by Scott Merrick, Lower School Technology Coordinator

Those parents who may not be aware of the USN Lower School Technology for Learning webpage might add this resource to your set of tools to keep in touch with what’s going on with your child’s education: http://usnlstech.blogspot.com/. I have a serious interest in keeping up with the "Big Conversation" about what is needed to prepare our children for the world they will inherit from us. My developing knowledge about this conversation informs what is brought to the curriculum in our computer lab. It’s kind of a loop, actually, assuming one can stand back and look at it that way. Much of the larger conversation I keep track of and participate in through my main personal/professional blog at http://scottmerrick.net/. Here’s a picture of the "Clustrmap" that notes the global locations of people who have read that blog since just since April 2007:



In an era when lots of energy in the public schools seems to be going into, as Jeff Uctech notes, preparing our children to be experts in filling in circles with number two pencils, I believe we teachers need to be skating on the outskirts of perception and collaboration. Uchtech elaborates, "Standardized tests don’t allow a teacher to walk on the side of chaos in fear that what they might teach, what may be a different way of learning, will not be acceptable when filling in circles." http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=500

Our children’s lives when they are adults will be far different from ours, of that there is no doubt. Assuming that we are, as we like to think we are doing, educating the future leaders of our society, the future architects of our culture, I believe we owe it to them (and to those they will lead and for whom they will design) to expose them to the amazing colaborative tools that are being developed at such a rapid pace that no one can really keep up with all of them. They really need to "learn how to learn," because we do not know the facts they’ll need. We can’t.

That’s why what Chris Dede (along with others) calls "distributed knowledge" may be the key concept our students will need to grasp and embrace if they are to lead in a future we cannot even imagine. Long ago, to paraphrase David Warlick, our great-grandparents needed to memorize everything in order to access it, or to have it on the shelf in their library. If it was not in a book they had read and had purchased, information really wasn’t of much use. An expert on any topic might be three days’ communication time away from them. Today, because of email and Web 2.0 (anyone else using twitter.com?) an expert’s response may be only seconds away. You no longer need to "know" all the facts: You do need to know how to 1) find the facts, 2) discriminate between valuable, authoritative, and valid facts and those that are insubstantial or unreliable, and 3) be able to assimilate valid information into a useful format for whatever task you need it for.

Seems simple. It’s not. Many educators are just starting to sort it out. In the course of that, many of us are teaching on a day-to-day basis and trying to make sure that we’re doing the best we can. Be patient with us. Support us. And trust that we care and that we will proceed with both caution and informed instincts.

Twitter and What's Going On?

Logged into my iGoogle this morning, after sitting down with the espresso I set up last night. Yesterday I'd added two Twitter widgets to my iGoogle, one to read and one to post, hoping to twit a little more productively by reducing the number of clicks it takes to perform those two tasks. Top of the read window? David Warlick, and I'll quote here: dwarlick: Just read Will's post (http://tinyurl.com/2xflq5). I'm not sure we are even capable of answering his rhetorical questions! .

So I did "just read," and I suggest you do too.

That took me to another browser start page tab, my Netvibes, to its own "Education" tab (my netvibes tabs are, in order, left-to-right, "General, Education, Second Life, Music, News, and Technology"), where I clicked on David's most recent rss-fed entry, "Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter,", where he posts a few interesting rhetorical questions of his own.

Just thought I'd start out your day or evening with some impossible though thought-provoking questions. My apologies in advance. :)

A Vision of Students Today, from Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch is, as David Warlick notes today, "at it again." Wesch (a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University) created the worldwide noted YouTube video "Web 2.0--The Machine is Us/ing Us," a digital ditty that earned him, among other noteriety, a 2007 WIRED magazine "Rave Award."

I thank David for the quick heads up on this one, via my RSS feed of his 2 Cents Worth blog. I took the time to post it here in part because it actually brought me to tears. I'd be interested to see your responses commented here.

Here's the link to Wesch's page containing the video, entitled "A Vision of Students Today," in turn embedded from YouTube.

(Not available at USN--blocked for bandwidth issues)

K12 Online Conference Starts Today!

Just shunting ya'll over to David Warlick's post about his opening keynote--will be listening a bit later...The chat interface David has tweaked (he calls it "Twitteresque," a reference to Twitter, a fascinating tool in and of itself) is amazing. Go read. Go listen...