Why Teens Don't Twitter!

Checking into email this morning, I noted a comment at megablogge Lucy Gray's new ning, "Making IT Personal" and popped over there, checking out some recent posts that took me to a discussion thread started by Gordon Shupe, called "When I say Personal Learning Network you say _____." So I of course had to comment "Second Life and Twitter." Then I saw a link in his original thread post that stated "Interesting article here worthy of discussion: http://mashable.com/2009/08/05/why-teens-dont-tweet/ ." This is good, ya'll, as Mashable.com blogger Ben Parr takes on staticstics from a recent Nielsen report that show that only 16 percent of Twitter users are under 25.

...Twitter is far less about the social graph than it is about the overall conversation surrounding an item. Retweets are about sharing items and @replies are about allowing the public to be part of a conversation you’re having with someone. If you just follow your friends on Twitter, you will barely be using it. A lot of the value comes from following interesting people and celebrities.

I'd say the whole article is worth a read, as it's replete with graphs and insight. READ MORE...

Clustrmap reset and how to exercise while working!

It's happening again: My little lonely clustrmap (see sidebar) will be reset to zero in a few days, an annual event I'm guessing the folks at clustrmap hold in order to keep the most popular maps (like David Warlick's) from becoming solid red dots.

Awwwwwwww.

Well, it's been an interesting year, and I want to thank the thousands of readers who have visited scottmerrick.net in an effort to learn anything I have to share in my meanderings through this lifetime.

I also want to thank the folks at Clustrmaps for developing such an inspiring tool, one that is easy to use and that tells me that from April 1 of 2008 until this very moment in which I'm blogging about it, my little effort has been visited by 5,145 human beings from every continent (excepting Antarctica--hey, where are you, explorers!). That's encouraging to me, and it gives me hope for the future of the globe, a world where people are engaged in active learning about one another and interested in others outside of their own local, national, or regional geographic areas. Life(s) is good.

Speaking of which, I am into an exercise routine that makes my family laugh at me but which, in combination of it and healthier food and beverage choices, has lost me around 10 pounds in the last 6 weeks or so. Here's an 00V00 video that shows it in action. Just another geeky moment that I shared out this morning at PBS's new Frontline Digital Nation project.

Here's a link to the video.

Cheerio!

PLEASE vote!

Hey, all,

My other blog, the one about Virtual Environments in the service of education, has just garnered a nomination for Best Use of Virtual Worlds in the Edubloggers Awards 2008 race. I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd click on over to the site and vote for "Oh! Virtual Learning" so I might take home the "Eddie" in that category this year. Voting goes through December but I'm all for pulling out ahead early and staying there. Not that I'm competitive, heheheee. Here's the link:

THANKS!!!

Brave New World Wide Web for Teachers!

This is soooooo worth a look. David Truss, a new favorite blogger at David Truss::Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts, mounted a video at blip.tv from a powerpoint pressie he had recently done. Up there ^ it is :)

I'll reference this one for a good long time, and I hope you find it valuable. I discovered it, btw, in a posting at my Diigo, which I really don't access as often as I should. It's all about the balance and the time, isn't it? But as Truss exemplifies, if you don't

The "Embedded Practicioner," -- Words of Blogging Wisdom from an 8th Grade English Teacher

I didn't mean to do it. After all, I had already spent over an hour in Second Life earlier in the day at a fantastic panel discussion on "Virtual Identity," the discussion facilitated by the dana centre in England. That panel featured Howard Rheingold, coiner of the term "smartmob" and widely acknowledged creater of the concept of "virtual community," and Will Gardner, founder of the non-profit "Childnet International," an internet safety organization created to "help make the Internet a great and safe place for children." I did some recording there but haven't had a chance to do anything with it. (I hope I can, since it was really wonderful.)

So when I logged in on my laptop at my boy's bedside while he went to sleep last night (he doesn't really need that anymore--it's just a tradition with us, one that I'm sure I'll be losing soon as he breaks into teenagedness) I never intended to get caught up in another online presentation. I made the crucial (propitious) mistake of checking out the happenings at the Auditorium on ISTE Island.

Friend Kevin Jarret (KJ Hax inworld) manages a wonderful Tuesday night speaker series over there, and his blog, "The Story of My Second Life," was one of the first ones that motivated me to begin blogging my Second Life experiences. Last night, KJ offered Torontan 8th grade English teacher Konrad Glogowski (SL: Konrad March) on the topic, "The Embedded Practicioner," sharing information about his journey from attachment to his "teacherly voice" to the development of his "readerly voice," which a teacher attempting to nurture literacy skills with blogs must, in Konrad's view, adopt.

Take 20 minutes and listen up to the segment of the talk I choose to share. If you are interested in educational blogging with students, I feel it's a "must listen!" Then head on over to Konrad's blog, "blog of proximal development," for more. I'll add the pics I took here soon, but here's one for starters, the one referenced early in Konrad's presentation, when he's talking about what most of us traditionally, and habitually, call "teaching":



Cheers,
Scott

Pics from Friday's TAIS Technology Institute in Memphis, Tennessee!

Friend Julene Reed, techwiz extraordinaire and Director of Technology at St. George's Independent School in Memphis, Tennessee, sent me pics from the event I blogged about earlier and I want to share them! Here's a picasaweb slideshow. You can click on the show to visit the slideshow for larger pics. This event was a great one for me, and I'll continue to share what I learned there often and loudly! Thanks, Julene!

Personal Learning Network Offer

Hey, ya'll,

From my favorite administrator's blog: PHSPrincipal Blog, this post where he muses about a comment from his own PLN (Personal Learning Network). Are you a colleague of mine? I don't care where you live or work, if you need help getting started with the kind of ongoing learning and collaboration Dave's talking about in his blog post, when he says "I have found that I spend more time now reading about educational issues than I did when I was working on my Masters degree or my Specialist in Ed. degree. One particular item that i read this past weekend has me thinking about our particular place in history..." you just let me know. I'll help.

Cheers,
Scott

Why Let Our Students Blog?

Forgive me if this is old news to you but it's new news to me. Connecting the dots from twitter to email to internet this morning (not an unusual pathway for me) I came across a video I'd like to share. It's from New Zealand teacher Rachel Boyd and I find it rather eloquent. Enjoy:

This Site is "Pornography?"

Part of me is laughing, part of me is steaming mad. I recently posted a call for educators in Second Life to visit ISTE Island there and vote for a blog to be featured at the Blogger's Hut, which I manage for ISTE. A fellow ISTE docent, Sabian Hawks, (Fil Santiago "irl"--"in real life) emailed me from his school in Los Angeles to inform me...well...let's let his email speak:

Scott,

I received your e-mail regarding the podcast voting and proceeded to click on your Web site. A strange thing happened: our filtration system blocked it and categorized it as ‘pornography’ - strange - thought you might want to check this out, as others may not be able to visit your site from work. (SL--Sabian Hawks)

Fil Santiago

My response to him:

Hey, Fil (SABE!),

I'm not surprised that you couldn't see my site. Sigh. many schools and content blockers disallow blogger and blogspot sites, since there is indeed some objectionable material there. I'm firmly in the camp of Wes Fryer about content filters. How are teachers to begin to learn to take advantage of the powerful networking tools of our age when they have their options limited by paranoid beaurocrats? I hope you'll take the time to visit the site from home if you can.

Thanks for the heads-up. Would you mind my quoting your message in a blog post?

Scott

Is there any hope for our public schools? I always prefer to hope, but I most seriously hope that our leaders pull their heads up out of their...addiction to 18th century learning models and open up things before it's too late. Clear expectations in the form of rigorously enforced Acceptable Use policies--for students AND faculty AND adminstration--are all that would be needed to step into the 21st century.

Check out Jamie McKenzie's take today on "Breaking the YouTube Blockade" to allow teachers to use some of the very valuable resources YouTube can provide.

The Globalization of Higher Education

I knew I did something right when I nominated the "Teaching College Math Technology Blog" for the March featured RSS feed in the Blogger's Hut in Second Life. Don't worry, you don't really have to understand any of the foregoing. Just know that if you are interested in teaching or learning, be it math or not, Maria H. Anderson's blog is well worth adding to your list of favorites.

This entry will point you not just to another blog, not just to an entertaining post by a thoughtful educator, not just to her description of an insightful (and maybe inciteful) presentation, but finally to the presentation itself. After you read Maria's armchair review, you'll want to visit YouTube to pick up the 5 part video of the complete (30 minute or so) presentation. I know I want to do that, and it's on my list of things to do in the early morning, before I start shaking the kids out of bed for the school day.

The presentation is called "Exiting the Educational Silo, Entering the Global Freeway." It was shared by Mike Lively (hmmmm, wonder if he knows the Kid-Web diva, Gail Lovely?) in Washington, DC (Maria doesn't say where), and is loaded up with interesting takes on the survival of our current models of technology in education, as well as their relationship to the size and scope of institutions. I won't spoil the joy of reading Maria's descriptive article for you, but I will mention my agreement with Lively's (along with co-presenters Sam Zachary and Kevin Corcoran) position that we don't have to have a faculty comprised of what he calls "Uber Instructors," (pic from her blog) but rather a faculty willing to innovate with a support team of knowledgeable and innovative designers "supporting their technological desires for improving pedagogy."

I am looking forward eagerly to seeing the first-hand delivery of Lively's "shot at the present day LMS leaders with this slide 'Why Present Day Learning Management Systems Will Fail.'" Go on, you know you want to see this slide and read the article, and then you know you want to view the presentation. Spoil yourself, just "doit."

It's Not Too Early to Think About Summer!

Cold and damp as it is in Nashville this mornin', I'm hoping that some portion of my 5 readers (just kidding--see the Clustrmap in the sidebar!) may be thinking about summer :)

I am offering four one-week workshops this summer, all of which are detailed in the "Web 2.0 for Us" wiki and three of which are still available for booking at your school. At the wiki, I describe the workshops pretty completely, so I won't repeat myself here. Isn't that refreshing?

Cheers!

Scott

David Jakes' Tech Learning Blogpost--Frustration!

For a really nice example of how blogs can spur discussion, I discovered a recent David Jakes post at the Technology and Learning blogsite. Returning there to look for it today for shareshare, I couldn't find it. I googled me man David (whom its been my pleasure to meet on a couple occasions at conferences) and found his new blog, "The Strength of Weak Ties," with the post I was looking for: "Under Construction."

In it, Jakes, a prolific proponent for Web 2.0, says, "The idea that teachers should build Web pages doesn’t work, and it’s a classic and representative example of why technology has not delivered on its potential in schools. Here are my top five reasons for this failure, and the failure of technology to alter the learning landscape…" He goes on to list and explain those five reasons, which include:

* Reason 1: Using technology to create and support learning opportunities in most
schools is not considered mission-critical.
* Reason 2: Most administrators have failed to understand technology and how it
applies to the learning process on the most fundamental level.
* Reason 3: Schools have not provided teachers with the proper tool(s),
infrastructure, or support to get the job done.
* Reason 4: Teachers are too comfortable.
* Reason 5: Teachers have not seen the benefit.

I highly recommend the read, especially for readers who are technology coordinators or curriculum experts. Most importantly, read the comments. It's an excellent example (is that redundant?) of how a blog can spur thinking and conversation amongst parties interested in the topic.

Cheerio!

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

This is no scoop--it's been blogged about several times already since its release yesterday, but I want to include it here partly as a reference for myself and partly as a reminder to add it to my reservoir of resources for a summer teacher workshop I'm offering for the upcoming summer. More about that later, but if you want to see where my mind (and my summer) is headed, visit the Scottweb2.0 wiki at http://scottweb20.wikispaces.com.

The folks at Commoncraft, already to be thanked for video releases on topics like social networking, wikis, blogs, and rss feeds, have done it again; they've made a tidy little animated video about a Web 2.0 tool and released it several places so that it can provide learning in a very viral way. I'm about to infect you :) From TeacherTube:

NYSACTE Video from Brian C. Smith

Here's a video from Darren Draper, a colleague of Brian C. Smith, who posted it at the NYSACTE ning.com site. The piece compiles a whole lot of current thought about education into an enjoyable, thought provoking set of comments and questions. It's resident on Brian's NYSACTE (New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education) conference ning. See what I mean:

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)

"Educational Change -- an Oxymoron?"

This post is actually posting to a post about a post. A meta-post?

Tom March put up what he calls a "little rant" at infinitethinking.org Tuesday about a New York Times op-ed piece by David Brooks. I want you to read the NYTimes piece, of course, but I want you to do so by way of March's very brief review of it.

Then go enjoy Brooks' remarkable little prose all about "the Sacred Order of the External Mind," It's good for a few chuckles, as well as its fair share of thought provoking moments, especially in combination with March's take on it. My own read is that Brooks is being not "a bit tongue in cheek," as Brooks describes it, but rather incredibly sarcastic. What do you think?

Have a minute?

Got the Winter Crud but...

Lying flat on my back with a chest cold today but it does give me a chance to catch up, inbetween nappies. I've been most active in my Second Life blogging lately. So much happening there, not a great deal happening here. Excepting, well, hmmmm...

Awaiting word on the proposal applications for NECC2008 in San Antonio. I put in three: two for the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt and one for Second Life. The first two are similar, one a session with IVC and one a poster session with IVC capability. I've done several of the former but none of the latter and I'm hoping that if one is accepted over the other that the poster goes through. I didn't even make it to the poster floor last year in Atlanta but I recall from the year before that it can be a busy place; plus it'll be a challenge for me to put together something in a new (two hour!) format. I'm so proud of the work that's going on at the school that I'd love to get the chance to share it out face to face with fellow educators: It's a big task to implement a program that brings 100 public school high school students, 25 from each grade level (the ultimate goal), to a university research campus one day a week. The fact that such a small staff makes it happen is nothing short of remarkable. The use of Moodle as a LMS (Learning Management System) is going well, and everyone's learning, even the young and stellar faculty!

It's also delivering some great audio for my podcast, Snacks4theBrain!. If you haven't caught the last one, featuring portions of an interactive videoconference between School freshmen and the director of the National Ice Core Laboratory, do so post haste...

I've blogged about the SL 3-hour workshop presentation proposal but if you missed that you can find its meat, carved up and served to the reviewers' table by 9 chefs from 9 different states in the country, at the SLedupotential wiki.

Finally, my lovely wife has just completed a huge fundraising event for and at my school, and you can see something about that at artclectic.org, the event's website. Due to the work of many volunteers it was immensely successful (and I should say that it is a testament to her capable and untiring work all year long that it even happened!), raising let's-just-say a bundle of discretionary funding for my school, including funding for teacher professional development and for its exemplary need-based scholarship program. artclectic (no caps) is also what my school director likes to say a "friendraiser," this year achieving great mention and excellent review in the local press and nothing but superlative comments from everyone I talked to. For me, it was a chance to see artists who are both world-class artists and wonderful human beings, some of whom I consider friends from the long association over the years Lee Ann's been making artclectic tick. To watch the little ones move through the stunning gallery on Education Day, especially, was both heartwarming and encouraging. I've been working on a video from that day, and when it's done I'll share it here!

Sigh, going back to sleep now...

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...

"sledupotential"

If you're not aware of what's going on with Second Life, the huge online MUVE (Multi-User Virtual Environment), you may be surprised to know that educational opportunities abound. I maintain a fairly oft-accessed blog about education in Second Life and usually keep my posts about that area of interest at the "Oh Second Life" blog. However, I want to encourage anyone interested to visit a wiki I set up over this past weekend, one I'm calling "sledupotential."

Since ISTE's annual NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) issued a call for proposals this past month, I've been wondering what sort of offering I might make for the 2008 conference in San Antonio. I've been going to these things since 2000, and I began presenting at the 2002 conference in San Antonio, helping design and deliver a half-day session on Interactive Videoconferencing put on for the then "Office" of Science Outreach at Vanderbilt University. Since then (with the exception of one year, NECC in Seattle, when I spent my time attending rather than presenting workshops) I have presented on various topics in New Orleans, San Diego, and Atlanta, missing only Chicago in 2001 and Philadelphia in 2005. See a history of past NECCs here.

These conferences have provided some of the most pivotal experiences in my adult learning life, as well as helping me establish collegial bonds and friendships of long duration; and I look forward to the conference every year. This year may be a landmark, though.

I'm going collaborative. Seriously collaborative.

See the wiki, which explains the process better than I can here. "sledupential" promises to be the most learning-loaded and thought-provoking session I've ever had the privilege of helping facilitate. I'm smiling now, smiling wide: Maybe it has something to do with the nine other colleagues from all over the country (haven't gone international yet but chances are we will be so by the end of the day) who have signed on as co-presenters. Maybe it has to do with the way this idea developed from a more-or-less casual chat at an ISTE "social" in Second Life.

Maybe I'm just crazy!

Time, as it always does, will tell. :)

Online Conference October 15-19 and October 22-26

Mark your calendars and peel off some multi-tasking time during the work-weeks October 15-19 and October 22-26 for the K12 Online Conference 2007. It looks like it'll be ripe with learning and sharing opportunities for anyone who can stop by. I'm also very interested in the tools that will be used for the mega-shareshare. If you see me there, say hi!




Learn more...

The official conference website has Wes Fryer asking bloggers to post three things they hope to gain by attending this year (remember, this is all online--all virtual--all digital).

Here are mine:

1) Making/renewing friendships with educators who are interested in making education better

2) Seeing how all this works, when facilitated by some of the best practitioners in the field, and discovering new tools or at least valid new use for tools I already know about

3) Adding one more thing to my already overwhelming to-do list!

Okay, the last one might be a little sarcastic, but since number 2 is really two things, I feel covered :)