NYSCATE Digital Wave in March--KEYNOTE! and omg

I'm pretty buzzed. Thanks to my friend Andy Wheelock, primarily, I'm sharing my first (and maybe only--I don't aspire to be a road warrior) conference keynote address at the NYSCATE Digital Wave conference this March 13. They folks there shared info in a flyer today (see above). You can read it in the copy I saved in my Dropbox.

There's so much going on this spring.

Top of the list is my lovely daughter's wedding to much loved Tim Buell in April. I'm proud and happy and already rehearsing my toast, which I'll likely flub despite the rehearsal.

Before we get there, though, there's the first annual v-TEACH Leadership Institute Feb. 27-28, then the aforementioned keynote in Western New York. I will also be presenting a session about 3DVLEs there. Be there or be non-virtually square.

Colin had his first day today at what one knowledgeable singer-songwriter friend categorized as "the best recording studio in the world" this very day. He'll complete 6 months of daily coursework at Blackbird Academy and emerge expert in studio recording. He's recording 8 songs now with Reel Love recording studio here, on his own with Bad Ladies, and I can't wait to hear the final runs. Lee Ann and I are the Executive Producers, investing toward the sure day when the world embraces his immense talent.

Lee Ann will be opening the Tin Wings storefront in the Nashville The Nations Neighborhood any week now. Prepare to be amazed and blessed by enhanced access to artful food of the highest order. I took in a test kitchen batch of "Butternut Squash Crumble Bars" today and the verdict from colleagues was unanimous: Tin Wings Worthy!

We'll put the house on the market shortly after Miranda's wedding. It's too much house for the two of us and we need a moving adventure. We're tired of walking past rooms we don't use!

There's stuff brewing at MNPS Virtual School I can't even talk about, but I can talk about my excitement at taking over our Middle School World History class as v-teacher. I'm diving into that full force, finally able to do what I've helped others do for years now--teach online. The spring semester consists of ancient history topics like the Roman Empire, Indian and Chinese dynasties, and Eastern and Western Africa. I'm of course working my way through the course content now, in order to be familiar with what the students have been working with. It's very neat stuff! It can be better, I know, and I'll work to make it so.

Julius Scottus

Keep on doing the next right thing. That's what's driving me.

#thisisnotaholidayupdate

"Innovator" Reflections Part 3

So, okay, I'm going out of order. Sort of. But one of my most exciting and magical innovations was devising and implementing SLedupotential at NECC 2008. That, of course, was back when ISTE called it's conferences the "National Educational Computing Conference."

All right, I'm lying again. I'll be a good boy and save SLedupotential for another post in this series.

Did I mention Snacks4theBrain? Yes I did, last post. Working one day a week for the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach, I produced and published 84 (or maybe more) podcasts, each of which you can still access at iTunes, and I've spent a little time looking for references to it. Here's one in an article at the Vanderbilt Register from 2006: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/archived-news/register/articles/index-id=28948.html.

How did I even get into this? Well, as I recall, I had been listening to podcasts from the early days, from the irreverent "Soccergirl" to Richard Vobes' "The Vobes Show," a daily online offering from a glorious madman in England. I also subscribed to Adam Curry's podcast, where the early MTV vjay held forth from his Netherlands expatriat residence, earning him the moniker "the podfather," because he claims to have invented the genre. Podcasts, of course, are online resident audio files, and after some time listening to my favorites I thought, well, how about one dedicated to emerging science? And let's make it entertaining. And let's add some music. I used

One of my favorite podcasts, The Goodbeershow, featured folks sitting around a table at a watering hole in Muncy, Indiana talking with Jeffrey T. Meyers about the beer(s) they were sampling that night, and he featured live or recorded music along with the ribald discussion. As it turned out, I was able to sit in and contribute to two shows in Muncy and to host one at Yazoo Brew here in Nashville when Jeffrey was passing through town. What fun all that was.

I proceeded to establish a format. I would open with a standard recorded intro, describe what was to come, play some independent (read: "free") music, interview a working scientist about her or his work, play some more independent music, and mess around a bunch. I would plug the Center for Science Outreach and their good work, reference the website, and play around with sound effects like a crazy person. I worked first in CoolEdit Pro, then Adobe bought that software and I moved to Adobe Audition. Eventually I was working with the freeware Audacity. And eventually, after all that work, I called it quits when I left the CSO (described in the last post).

I was "in the Cat Bird Seat," as my father-in-law would say. I'd invented something, was able to produce it mostly at home every Monday whilst working for the CSO, run in for meetings when necessary, and everyone was happy. Best of all, I interviewed a bunch of brilliant people, pretending that I knew what I was doing and, almost unimaginably, getting away with it.

You know that Vanderbilt scientist the national news always breaks out when there's any kind of viral outbreak? Dr. William Shaffner? I interviewed him about the Swine flu. Check. You know David Warlick, brilliant front vanguard for change in education? I interviewed him and we became friends. Peggy Sheehy? Of Second Life Teen Grid reknown? Check, and dear friend. Steve Spangler, the modern-day Mr. Wizard? Check. It's all there at Snacks4theBrain. Still and always. They are archived in the Vanderbilt University Discovery Archive. Go listen to one and help keep the series alive. I'd appreciate it. Hint: The best way to do this is to "Save File" and listen locally. You may need to rename it, taking out some weird characters, before it works. Looks like they need to do some maintenance on their 2008 archives. Ha. The direct link in http://discoverarchive.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/3186 but I've already renamed it and made it available for you at the following:

Here's a link to one episode, my replay of an earlier Dr. William Shaffner interview, so if you have 30 minutes for some weirdness and fun, go for it. 

http://abcnews.go.com/meta/search/imageDetail?format=plain&source=http://abcnews.go.com/images/Health/FLU_Snapshot_William_Schaffner 

So yeah, that's something I'm proud of. Something else I made up. More "innovation," though I was just making things up. It's what I do.

So SLedupotential next post? Maybe. Maybe not...

Stay tooned.

"Innovator" Reflections Part 2

Even though I didn't label the last post "'Innovator Reflections' Pt. 1," I'm going with it henceforth . Yesterday, in connection with the upcoming release of my selection as "Innovator of the Month" of June 2014 with THE Journal, I said I'd post daily until I ran out, or at least until Thursday of next week, when my webinar entitled "Starting and Maintaining a Virtual School" will hit the 'netz live and then be archived. I have been reflecting on the innovations I'm most proud of and I'm going to lump two into this post at the risk of running out soon.

From 1999 to the middle of 2010, my main work took place in the computer lab at University School of Nashville, after having taught 3rd grade for 3 years there. In 2001, I was asked by Vanderbilt University to leave USN to work full-time as "Teacher in Residence" for the Vanderbilt University Office of Science Outreach. I had been recruited by Dr. Susan Kuner, with whom I had done some work in the then very infant stages of videoconferencing at Vanderbilt Virtual School (not really a virtual school, but rather its own videoconferencing outreach, a very early iteration from which I learned bushels).

I loved my job at USN and my beautiful daughter Miranda was attending school there, and with my amazing son Colin just starting there as well I didn't want to leave my kids, or my students, all ~360 of them, whom I saw each week in the lab. We worked out a deal--I would work Mondays at the OSO, and my classes at USN would be compressed into the remaining four weekdays. It was doable, and we done it. This went on through 2008-2009, when the grant funding supporting the position ran out and I was let go, gently and with genuine compassion, by the Director of the by then Center for Science Outreach, Dr. Virginia Shepherd. Ginny explained that with the newly minted School for Science and Math taking off so solidly, priorities had changed, and I silently added in my mind that they had discovered that they needed the funding they had been allocating to supporting a rogue, independent, innovator for their new project and more classroom teachers for this amazingly innovative project. Learn more about it at theschool.vanderbilt.edu.

All this to say that I had a blast working with the CSO, all the way from its foundations as the OSO. That's where I first met and worked with dear friends Dr. Kecia Ray, now President of the  International Society for Technology in Education, and Jan Zanetis, now CEO of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration). Ginny Shepherd more or less let me make up things, and the two best things I made up were the "VIA Dyer" Interactive Videoconferencing series and "Snacks4theBrain," an 84 episode podcast from the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach. Let's briefly detail these.

VIA is an acronym I used to describe "Videoconference Interactions with Astronomers and the "Dyer" is simply Dyer Observatory at the top of a hill just outside of Brentwood, Tennessee. The double entendre, in that the interactions came "via," or "by way of" Dyer Observatory, was indeed intended. I do not recall how I first got hooked into Dyer, but I believe it was that the OSO had placed one of a couple dozen grant-purchased high-end videoconferencing codecs (hardware) in school around the MNPS school district and also one up at Dyer, and I first went up there to help them get it set up. There I met with a man who has become one of my closest friends, Rocky Alvey. He's a story unto himself, then Superintendent and now Director of the Observatory and truly a Renaissance Man.

Long story short, over the course of a couple of years I helped design the website for the Observatory, upon which they have built nicely, and we served up a couple dozen weekly and then bi-weekly interactions with students around the country. A classroom would sit together in front of their own codec, wherever they were, and I would set up the videoconferencing camera on an expert in the field of astronomy, and they would do a little presentation, often a PowerPoint that I would operate as the "next slide" guy, then answer questions from the remotely located peanut gallery. Here's a snapshot from the Internet Wayback Machine (a great resource) from 2004 and here's a pic of one of these interactions featuring former astronaut and then-Director of Dyer, Dr. Rick Chappel:

Producing VIA Dyer was as much a learning experience for me as for the students. That's why I did it, really, trying as I have since I became an educator to push the technology into the service of learning and teaching. Building that program, then reluctantly letting it go (though Rocky has not--see a 2013 videoconference video from Dyer!), was a learning experience for me that prepared me for what I'm doing now. I am thankful to Dr. Ginny Shepherd for believing in me enough to let me innovate, and for Rocky Alvey for being open enough, and innovative enough himself, to support and help develop VIA Dyer. Maybe THE Journal needs to hit up my man Rocky!

Okay, that's enough for this morning: I lied. I'll share "Snacks4the Brain!" tomorrow. It's a doozy of a story that requires more description than I have time for this morning. Got to shower and get in to today's work at MNPS Virtual School, where "We Never Close."

See ya (that will mean more when you hear some S4theB!: heck, if you're an auditory learner and want a preview, head on over to iTunes and grab some Snacks before checking in here tomorrow. It's a body of work, don'tcha know.

"Innovator" Reflections, Part 1 -- "Innovator of the Month" at THE Journal--Honored, I am.

It's been awhile. I've been very busy with my work and more. Putting up our Summer School program at MNPS Virtual School, getting ready for ISTE, preparing for an upcoming EduTalk Radio interview, prepping for a June 26 webinar for THE Journal, and living life with a wife whose entrepreneurial efforts at TinWings are maxing out her time and our world!

I've also been fishing:



Catfish at Marrowbone Lake from a rented canoe

So. An editor from THE Journal, a leading publication for technology in education, emailed a query to do a phone interview because "someone" had suggested I might be a likely candidate for their ongoing "Innovator of the Month" article. This was clear out of the blue for me, and I tentatively responded affirmatively. Any given month, we're innovating at my work, as the process of building a lasting, viable, and valid online public virtual school moves along its path.

I've done my share of innovating over the past couple of decades, once I found my own path, mid-life, as an educator. Back when I was teaching 3rd grade at University School of Nashville I collaborated with a friend newly found on ePals.com, Darrick Mosser, to build what they now call Project Based Learning between my 3rd graders in Nashville and his 4th graders in Japan. To do the videoconferencing part of this, I strung 50 feet of telephone line from the nearest telephone, in the office of the Learning Specialist, to my classroom, stringing it through the dropped ceiling tiles of the hallways and dropping it to my classroom Mac, on which I had installed CUSeeMe. The students met to meet their already established ePals penpals (Darrick's kids in an classroom overnight sleepover, brave man), and together we thought about what we were going to do over the coming months. We set out an interview project, focused on the time of America's Great Depression, and together brainstormed some questions everyone would ask their "elder," someone who had lived through that time. We decided everyone would produce a portrait of their elder and a portrait of themselves and write out their interview questions and their answers and we would publish this on the internet. Only then it was the Internet. We named our project "ElderQuest."

Finally, we set a date for another classroom sleepover when we would meet again to celebrate. We did, and I put up everything on the school's website (long taken down but archived somewhere on an old hard drive), and then we moved on to cursive writing. Those were the days, well before the Lower School moved on to standardize what was going on at the grade level at any time, all in the service of common practice. I don't think ElderQuest or something so organically developed would be possible today in any classroom, public or private, though I think it should be. Those were the days that the art of teaching trumped the dictated, orchestrated practice of it.

Anyway, I"m doing the EduTalk Radio show interview live on the 19th, this Thursday, and it's to be focused on my current work. What I intend to do each morning until then (just innovated during the writing of this post) is to think back on what got me here, and to write about something I did that I consider could be thought of as "innovative," one per day until I'm played out. If it goes past Thursday, it can be a resource for my related webinar on Thursday the 26th, titled "Starting and Maintaining an Online School." This'll be fun. For me, anyway.

Here are the links to the live (then both will be archived) events this and next week:

Education Talk Radio (will be linked there Thursday, June 19, and live at 11:00am CDT).
Starting and Maintaining a Virtual School, Thursday, June 26, at 3pm CDT. You can register now!

Educational Change Video Marathon

I'm leaving work at the end of the day today to visit my alma mater (Peabody College for Teachers at Vanderbilt University) a few blocks away from my office at MNPS Virtual Learning. I'm going there view what I think is the first local screening of the independent film "Race to Nowhere." This is a movie I've been looking forward to seeing ever since I first learned about it on Facebook. Formerly subtitled "The Dark Side of America's Achievement Culture," its trailer, which I share at the end of this post, is intriguing, to say the least.

As the father of two beautiful children and something of an advocate for change (I feel personally responsible for the word "radical" appearing in the National Educational Technology Plan: "...the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies should identify key emerging trends and priorities and recruit and bring together the best minds and organizations to collaborate on high-risk/high-gain education R&D projects. It should aim for radical, orders-of-magnitude improvements by envisioning the impact of innovations and then working backward to identify the fundamental breakthroughs required to make them possible."), I am most interested in seeing this film for myself, even if it means subjecting myself to "heartbreaking stories of young people across the country who have been pushed to the brink..." as advertised at the film's website.

Anticipation has me musing about the trend for change advocates to "Hollywoodize" their views by creating videos or, as this one is, full-length films and promoting their entertainment value, even to the point of profiting from them. Again, I want to share the trailer for tonight's film here, but before I do I'd suggest you beef up your upcoming Education Change Video Marathon by adding one or more of these film/videos to the bill. Here are several I've recently viewed, along links to their own trailers and some descriptive text from their respective websites. Watch each trailer and tell me you aren't motivated to view at least one of them:

Pricele$$, from Habitat Media, about the true cost of our current political fundraising legislation -- "PRICELE$$ is a one-hour documentary journey from 4th of July revelry to America's croplands; from hopeful windfarms to our nation's capitol in search of some answers. Maybe even a solution. The colorful cast of characters will inform, move, and amuse you. You'll be privy to personal accounts of lives upended and hear how postal rates cause global warming. You'll learn the definition of "running clean" and discover the fate of two politicians who actually enjoyed fundraising. Even the third graders in our film know something has to change."


ACT Out Against SAT, from Sam Kaufman, about the unfairness of using SAT scores for college entrance -- Host Allie Kaufman says, "I'm a high school student; my father is an award-winning filmmaker, and together we uncovered startling evidence that proves standardized tests are totally unfair to many students. If you've visited our website and watched our film athttp://www.ACToutagainstSAT.com then you know the tests are biased against females, students whose second language is English, against minorities, students who can't afford quality test prep classes or tutors, and all those students who aren't good on standardized tests--even though they do great in school. And you know that the SAT Essay section is a complete joke." And here's an article from the Huffington Post describing the petition driving effort.


Waiting for Superman, from Davis Guggenheim and Michele Rhee, a stirring (and controversial) film about "the failures of the public education system in America that makes suggestions (also controversial) to "fix" it. Disclaimer--I have not actually seen this film, but just now went into my Netflix queue. I'll weigh in on the debate just as soon as I experience it first hand. 


Okay, here is the Race to Nowhere trailer, posted from TeacherTube so that even working teachers in firewall/blocked schools should be to watch it this very moment:

Having discovered this by means of a circuitous route (wave twitter, weblogged-ed, .pdf) I want to toss it out as if not required reading at least highly suggested reading.

Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong have produced a seminal treatment of educational innovation whose citations and stats should inform any discussion which centers around the future of education. Breaking the options down to only four types, it's holding up quite nicely and inspiring me to think even more radically than I have done in the past.

It's a Cisco white paper called "Learning from the Extremes," and you can read the entire 40 page .pdf at http://www.cisco.com/web/about/citizenship/socio-economic/docs/Lear...

Time crunched? Want the Cliffnotes version? Will Richardson does a typically great job for you at http://weblogg-ed.com/2010/transforming-learningno-really/

but like Will, I highly encourage you to go to the source for its case studies and descriptions of disruptive innovations that likely fall outside your usual media net. The timeline of how schools developed in the first place is by itself enough to warrant the effort.

While the report draws many of its examples from innovation in the developing world, it does address "the developed world" and its challenges. I'm going to print one section of this stunningly detailed report to give you a good taste of it. I hope that taste whets your appetite enough for you to investigate further:

The Developed World: Cracking the Code

For as long as there have been schools, there have been attempts to radically remake them. These efforts gathered pace in the 1960s in the United States and Europe— for example, through more childcentred education, the open-air school movement, and efforts to create more open plan schools, which felt more like communities and less like factories.3

Schools catering for children with special needs, often operating at the margins of the mainstream system, have pioneered more personalized approaches to learning—for example, using individualized timetables and one-to-one tutoring.38 Schools influenced by alternative pedagogies—Montessori and Steiner schools, liberal arts schools such as Dartington and Summerhill in the United Kingdom, and Big Picture schools in the United States and Australia—focus on creativity, social skills, and studentled learning. Schools in special circumstances, such as the Djarragun in Northern Queensland, which serves an isolated, indigenous community, organize learning around real-world, practical, problemsolving learning, which starts from questions the children want to answer. Learning in all these schools is more personalized and fluid, driven by questions rather than a rigid curriculum.

These experiments have tended to be the exception that proves the rule. However, in the past decade, more systematic efforts have been made to introduce disruptive innovation into schooling. In the United States, some charter schools have developed more creative and personalized approaches to learning. A prime example is the High Tech High network of schools, which offers a wide range of project-based approaches to creative learning. In Sweden, parents have been given the power to set up state-funded “free” schools by pooling the budgets allocated to their children.39 This has led to a wave of new, smaller schools being set up. Every child in the Kunskapsskolan chain of schools in Sweden has a personalized curriculum and a timetable assembled from different modules. Children are taught in groups according to the stage they have reached rather than the age they are. At the start of each of five terms, every child agrees on learning goals with their personal tutor and their parents. Kunskapsskolan’s 14 schools are housed in reused offices, hospitals, and stables; only one is in a dedicated school building. In the United Kingdom, new kinds of schools are being created by: academies, which are sponsored by a company and often specialize in a field such as media, arts, or business; schools created by groups of parents; Studio Schools, which are small schools in shopping centers, for children disaffected from standard school; and cooperative schools, which are owned by staff and the community. The spread of more personalized approaches to learning—tailoring how, when, and where children learn to their requirements—has transformed schools such as Cramlington Community College in Northumberland.

The Orstad Gymnasium in Hellerup, Denmark, has been designed so that there are not enough classrooms for lessons, thus forcing students and teachers to use many of the other informal learning spaces in the school, including the canteen, and so to learn in different ways. Schools all over the world are experimenting with virtual and distance learning environments.

Across the world, policymakers are starting to open up routes for new entrants to create new kinds of schools. In New Orleans, the city is remaking its education system based on commissioning services from a range of independent providers, thus giving it scope to continually stimulate the school system with new approaches.

As you can guess, there's much much more in the report, including a beautiful simple four panel grid called the "Education Innovation Grid." While it would be easy to paste that here, I'm going to up the ante to get you to go read the full report by refraining from posting it! Cheers!

I'm not sure this can be called a blog post but I'm so excited about this I feel the best thing I can do is to send you to the source. Pop a bag of popcorn, pull up your easy chair, and watch as the future of online communication changes ineluctably.

It's the jiz.

Google Wave.

Watch this:

David Jakes asks: how innovative are you?

David Jakes is at it again. His blog post today at Tech&Learning is at once stimulating and challenging. If I were a negative person I'd be a little discouraged. Since I'm not, I'm driving you to his thought-provoking views on the value and acceptance of innovation in education:

David Jakes asks: how innovative are you?

David quickly gets to the point: "I’m not interested in being satisfied with pockets of innovation. Yes, they can be recognized, which for many schools, is the end point and the final rest stop of innovation in most schools. There can certainly be more however, with those same pockets analyzed for what works and why, amplified to increase their visibility and importance, and systematized to make a difference for all."              READ MORE...  

KZOwebcasting NECC 2008!!!

Thanks again to Twitter, and to kpruitt in particular, for leading me this morning to the http://www.kzowebcasting.com/necc/ website. Like many others at NECC2008 in San Antonio, Texas, I missed a lot of sessions I really wanted to make. This site makes it possible for me to be there, albeit asynchronously. I'll be pointing my folks at my week-long Web2.0 for Us! workshop next week to this site, and may even use some of our precious time together to view these together using the kzowebcasting interface. Yay!

What if I form a "club" to visit these videocasts on a weekly or monthly basis with a group of my colleagues at my school over a cup of coffee or a local brew so that they can benefit from experiencing them the way that I now get to?

See my earlier post about how I actually spent my time at NECC!