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

THE BEST ISTE EVER: Day 2 Reflections, part 1

Yes indeedy it was an early one. And a late one. Let's begin at the beginning.

Sunday morning, up at 5:00 a.m. to an alarm and into the fitness room for a long stationary bike ride. Quick shower and out to the Hyatt Ballroom A to meet up with the EPIC Leadership leadership team. I met Chris Haskell for the first time, got my first ISTE hug from dear Anne Collier, Bron Stuckey, and met several new pals. We were issued event tee-shirts and red bandanas, which we were instructed to wear and to customize with a sharpie message.

Scott and Andy, dis and dat. Ready for EPIC Leadership

Peggy Sheehy is the genius behind the event, a staple of ISTE conferences for years. Sometimes called the "Leadership Symposium," it has gathered thought leaders from around the globe year after year. This year, though, with Peggy in charge, we were all in for a new experience. Those of us who had either enlisted or been volunteered to help already knew that, but wow, were the clueless in for a clue.

For starters, Peggy set the theme with a welcome that eased the attendees into the event sort of traditionally, a description of the events to come and the rules of the game, , including a closing appearance by the amazing opening keynoter (this conference was literally the first time I heard that term, so I'm excited to use it!) Jane McGonigal. She held a dramatic reading of the challenges to come, wherein the assembled were to look for numerals that would decode into a solution to the location of "The Palladin." This is where brain cells began to fry in the room. The next three hours would be challenging, frustrating, and a learning experience for all assembled.

Peggy then announced an icebreaker, Kae Novak, soon to ascend to the Lowly High Grand Poobah (read "Chair") of ISTE SIGVE, took the stage.

"You all have at your tables one brown bag with the instructions written on it--'Do Not Open.'" Laughter. "Inside you will find a long strip of tape, a quantity of uncooked spaghetti, and a marshmallow." Silence.

"Your task is to work with those at your table to create the largest possible free-standing structure with the marshmallow on its top. The clock is ticking. Go (paraphrased)."

For the next ten or 15 minutes each table worked to do so. The ensuing activity was frenetic, fascinating, and as a facilitator I found it enlightening in surprising ways. As noted by dear friend Bron Stuckey, men mostly took over the tables. Some confusion about the task existed. Cheating and stretching rules ensued. We made it through the allotted time and a winner was announced.

After that event, Anne Collier was up. She shared an enlightening presentation centered around the families, students, and attitudes about gaming and online security. Awesome as always, she implied that we are doing a great disservice to our students to ignore the obvious--there is value in games for learning, and parents needs must know what's going on.

 Breakout sessions moved to 3 separate staging areas each with two ongoing presentations on one of six topics, happening twice so attendees could pick and choose between them. They were number and color coded and we learned that a map cheat-sheet would have helped. Here are the sessions:

I roamed between the sessons during that period of the morning and in retrospect I wish I'd picked two and caught them in their entirety, but I was caught up in the helping thing. I did take time out to chase Andy in his detective's disguise (he made me do it) through all three sessions at a run, for no reason other than that we could. Here's a poser if I ever saw one:




After the sessions, the game got intense, we only had an hour left, and Jane McGonigal was scheduled to close us. According to a complicated and only partly understood by me set of rules, tables were playing against one another and were charged with determining 10 numbers that would be decoded into a final clue that would lead to the elusive Palladin. Finally, one table determined it was a phone number. With prompting from the stage it was determined it was a 212 number, then one table called it and over the speaker we heard the winner proclaim, "I have found the Palladin." Loud applause, a wrap up reminding the assembled that failure is an important process of the gaming experience, that mysteries are not meant to be easy to solve, and that fun is fun and that must also be kept in mind.

Jane McGonigal is an amazing individual. A game designer by profession, she has been called to the spotlight by experiences including injury, brain damage, frustration leading to depression and suicidal thoughts, and then pulling herself out of that by doing what she does best--designing a game called "Super Better," with which she has helped people all over the globe regain stability. Her 2010 TED Talk has garnered 3,127,045 views as I write. If you haven't seen it, take the 20 minutes or so it'll take to do so. It may not change your life, but it will help you understand how dynamic, sincere, empassioned, and intelligent Jane McGonigal is.

She walked out to resounding applause and said words to the effect, "I'm giving a talk tonight, the opening keynote, as you may know, so for the next half hour or so I would just like to do some questions and answers." She proceeded to do so.

I can promise you this: Anyone in the room who may not have been a fan before this intimate session (and there were many in the room who came into it disbelievers and may have left only with their old-school mind sets only slightly affected) has to have been seriously challenged by it. McGonigal was natural, open, candid, and she even granted permission for our Rosie Vojtek and her husband Bob to record the answer to their question and share it through the vehicle of the hot-off-the-virtual-presses June issue of the Virtual Education Journal. You must give this 194 page issue a read!

Here's the answer to Rosie's question about McGonigal's personal favorite "Fiero Moment." Watch closely for a very personal moment:

Here's a bonus for getting this far in the post, my Flickr Set of the Event!

That marvelous session done, we moved to the "Making IT Happen" awards and lunch, the SIG Open House, and the Opening Keynote. I can see I have to break up this day or else present such a long post not one of you will read it. Signing out for now, but not before thanking Peggy Sheehy and all the facilitators of EPIC Leadership: Beyond the Hype of Gamification for making it the most memorable Leadership Event of all the many ISTE/NECCs I have attended. Over and out. Typos? I'll edit again on the plane!

ISTE Eduverse Talks Appearance!

I hope you can join us in Second Life this next Tuesday, June 9, as my avatar sits down at 5 pm SLT on stage with those of Peggy Sheehy, Marianne Malmstrom, Andy Wheelock and host Kevin Jarrett to talk about the impact of Second Life and ISTE on my "real life." In the live talk show, ISTE Eduverse Talks, you'll likely hear me say that Second Life, for me, isn't a "second life," but rather a fun and exciting extension of my only life into another realm. I've made dear friends, whom I see admittedly more often than I see my "real world" friends, and I've shuttled  some of those friendships over into "real life" to become colleagues and collaborators in ways that would never have thrived as they have, not even been possible, without Second Life.

A couple summers ago, David Warlick, kindly Skyping in for a talk with a group of teachers I was leading into Web 2.0, made the statement: "Scott and I aren't friends because of our geographical proximity, we're friends because of what we think." I'll always cherish that concept, and it goes a long way toward explaining the draw of Second Life, Twitter, and any other tool I can use to network with innovative and technology savvy educators. Life(s) is good.

Location: ISTE Broadcast Studio: 
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island%203/197/238/23

I hope you'll come to see and hear what I know will be a fascinating hour. Here's a pic from the most recent episode of the show (sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and ISTE and produced in collaboration with the Second Life Cable Network!):

Now I have to go shopping for professional virtual clothes. I don't think my medieval knight's cape or my MUVErs scrubs will do the trick!

Fantastic "Case Study" Features "Teen Perspectives on Second Life"

I'm going to cross-post this to "Oh! Virtual Learning" just because it's so cool. Seldom do I find extremely detailed treatments of education in Virtual Environments, and this one is nothing short of extraordinary.

Steve Collis is "a French/English teacher, and 'Head of Innovation' at Northern Beaches Christian School and its innovation arm, the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning" in Sydney, Australia. He recently visited my good friend and colleague Peggy Sheehy at her school in Ramapo, New York, to examine how she has become the nation's premier "virtual pioneer" in using VE to facilitate teaching and learning for her young students. He reported out a week ago at his blog, "HappySteve" (a great name for a blog!, subtitled "Teachers, Technology, Learning"), and I want to urgently suggest (is that subtle enough) that you go visit the particular blogpost (permalink) to view his video documentation. Bookmark it, share it, shout it to the world(s).

Steve, who doesn't know it yet but soon will be roped into my own Professional Learning Network, says of his travels,

"If there is one thing that has stood out to me from her observations on the educational value of a 3D virtual world, it's the notion of a "Psychosocial Moratorium" - a term coined by Erik Erikson. The idea is that the social space of a 3D virtual online world is particularly 'safe', and therefore particularly beneficial for nurturing the confidence of adolescents trying to figure out who they are, what they are good at, what they stand for and what they are are known for. As someone who has spent countless hours in the safety of online environments, I know exactly what she means. As of November 2008 I am seeking to set up Teen Second Life for my school, and can't wait to see how the students respond. Peggy has many anecdotes of students who have 'found themselves' through what is essentially a scaffold to constructing social identity (my wording there)."

When I first met Peggy, at NECC2007 in Atlanta, Georgia (if memory serves me correctly), I was struck by the same sort of impression. This is a passionately visionary educator, a librarian by training, who has struck out virtually (sorry) on her own and gathered legions of followers to create a productive, successful model of how teaching and learning can differ--now, in the early 21st century--from the stale, tried-but-no-longer-true, instructor-centered pedagogies of our great-great grandparents' schools.

Go visit "Happy Steve" and see what I mean. Literally!

To warm you up, here's an embed of the first in the series of no less than 7 short videos:

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 :)

Tons of Photos from a NY meetup on the Second Life Teen Grid Work!

Thanks to Kevin Jarrett, tons of pics from his work this past week with Bernajean Porter, Peggy Sheehy and Marianne Malmstrom on a variety of projects in the Second Life Teen Grid. At TAIS I had a number of educators ask me what's going on with Second Life. Here's a set of things, most certainly.

Go see 'em at a flickr slideshow!