Speaking to a group of students at Peabody College Grad School--Web 2.0 for Us

Just to chronicle a diversion in my normal path in working with teachers, upon the invitation of a colleague at my school (the wonderful Genie Tanner), I stepped into "higherhigher" education Friday early evening. More or less successfully tailoring my Web 2.0 for Us evangelic message to the assembled group of 15 or so graduate students in the College of Human Development, in a class entitled "Advanced Information Systems," I struck out across the street armed with a wiki page I'd slapped together in the morning as a fulcrum. The tools I share are so dynamic and immediate in nature, somehow locking down a talk about them into a framework of sequential bullet points seems counterproductive.

I explained early on to the mostly business-centered students that I was trying to wean myself from PowerPoints. I predict that I will return to presentation software someday, but I'm not going to use it at all for a while.

See below for the simple wiki notes page I made, and the one Genie put up on their own wiki during my interaction with the students . Both of us were 'sperimenting :). Here's the interesting thing, at least to me: Compare the two and you'll see how my non-linear approach enabled me to play off questions and ad hoc insights to share more than I may have shared with a traditional PowerPointy presentation. If you are in the presentation "game," how do you pull it off? Are you grounded in PowerPoint? What else works well!?

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!

At TAIS -- ustreaming Will Richardson and more!

The Tennessee Ass'n of Independent Schools Tech Institute in Memphis, Tennessee is underway and I'll have more later from the hotel room tonight. I'm archiving it on ustream.tv, and if you get in live today you may catch it live! The address is http://ustream.tv/scottmerrick if you want to check it out! Resources he talks about are at Will's Weblogged-Ed wiki. Will's blog, linked in my sidebar for well over two years now, is Weblogged-Ed, one of the (if not the) first blogs to be created about education and "the read-write web." One of my favorite recent posts is his 53 second snippet from UK maven Dr. Steven Heppel, simply entitled "Universal Learning Care," a compelling analogy, the concept that "learning goes with you through life, just as health does."

Here's a url to Will's presentation on RSS--treat yourself to it! And I've now prettied up the videos of his sessions, so have at those at ustream.tv.

Awwww, heck--here's the embed:



and here's the backchat from that session!

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:

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...

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...

"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. :)

Web 2.0 Update

Just a quickie this morning to point you to a new blogpost at my Classroom 2.0 site. Why copy and paste here when I can simply link you to it!?

New Snacks4theBrain! Podcast Features NECC2007!

Hey! Just finished posting episode number 58 of Snacks4theBrain! and thought it might be good to let everyone know here. The 20 min. podcast features snippets from Peggy Sheehy, Kathy Schrock, and Chris Dede--all three of whom presented stellar talks at the National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta, Georgia (Chris's excerpt is from his keynote the subsequent "online learning institute" tagged onto the tail end of NECC). Go visit the S4theB! blog to listen and learn more.

Oh, for those monitoring for news of the new podcast "uber-device" to which I alluded in my Windows Podcasting talk at NECC, the current news is that its release is set for October of this year. As soon as I have leave to let out more I promise I'll do so right here (though you'll probably hear of it elsewhere as well--it's too big an innovation to escape large press).

If you haven't already, check out and keep an eye on the developments that will blossom over at the Web 2.0 in Education's week-long workshop at the University School of Nashville next week.

Second Life NECC 2007 Birds of a Feather Video!!!

It's at the Scott in Second Life blog. Have at it! Oh heck, let's repost it here!

Thank you Zsuzsa Thomsen! You ROCK! I SAW you with that videocam. You did a great job of grabbing pieces of the hour and a half fun-fest that Jeremy and I did before he lost every electronic connection he had when his power went out from the San Antonio thunderstorm. It's always something!!!

Chris O'Neal at the "online learning institute"

Wow.

Chris O'Neal, University of Virginia, working with the Virginia Dept. of Education to provide professional outreach to teachers. He also teaches classes at UV and is pursuing his doctorate in Research and Evaluation. He also is presenting the Panel introduction to the second set of roundtables here at the ECB/SERB "online learning institute."

Some notes:

"If my 11 year old is so tech savvy, what about her little 4 year old cousin who's doing things Chloe didn't do until she was 8? The question I want to ask is "are we ready for these kids?"

Chris showed the video I shared with my teachers just three weeks ago, Mike Wesch's "The Machine is Us." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE .

I like him already.

Teachers need to ask these questions about 2.0 tools:

• applicability to classroom--content, needs, standards


• dependability


• ease of use


• student safety and information literacy


• teacher tech savviness and student media literacy


• copyright and fair use concerns


• tapping into the myspace mind
  

"The digital divide that we do have control over" is who gets computer time in school. What happens now is that the kids who have all the tech at home get the most computer time at school."

"You can have this whole PowerPoint if you want it. Just copy it, delete my name and add yours...I don't care."

Wikis offer collective editing--a whole roomful of teachers editing a document

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

On Wikipedia, "the benefit of collective intelligence is also collective ignorance. Absolutely tell your students to use Wikipedia, but let's put it in the context of curriculum and tell the ppl who contribute to Wikipedia "Listen, the person who's coming after you is my 11 year-old so you better make sure your information is correct because she's going to research and correct it if it's not."

Losing track at the moment because I'm getting so into this talk. It will all be online at http://ecb.org/ within the week.