Do yourself a favour and take some time to watch Professor Michael Wesch’s brilliant presentation to the Library of Congress, June 23, 2008. The video is 55 minutes long, but is an excellent backgrounder to social media, user-generated content, and online communities through the lens of anthropology.
This will be required viewing for my students.
Sorry for this quiet space as of late, but I am currently in Greece attending ICICTE 2008 in Corfu.
I have been busy with a number of things these days. Here are a few thoughts on the what is happening.
re: TLT08
I just came back from the TLT 2008 conference in Saskatoon. It was an excellent conference, and much better than last year. Highlights for me include the amazing keynotes by Rick Schwier and George Siemens, and excellent presentations by Brian Lamb and Dean Shareski. Unfortunately, I missed the keynote by Stephen Downes, although I heard it was amazing. Luckily, I was able to catch breakfast with Stephen and Dean the first day of the conference.
I was a part of three presentations at TLT. First, I presented with Kyle, Vi, Tiffany, and Ashley regarding our Digital Internship Project. Second, I co-presented with the Edtech Posse (Rick, Dean, Heather, Rob) on “The Posse Round Up 2.0“. Finally, I presented again with Rob regarding the Graduate course we recently co-taught, EC&I 831. I am currently researching the process and outcomes of this course, and Rob and I presented some of our initial observations. It was great to have met, former students of the course, Cindy, Dan, and Shaun at the conference as well.
I was also very lucky to have finally met some terrific people for the first time face-to-face. Jen, Cindy, Brian, D’Arcy, Kirk and Kelly … you are all amazing people. It was great to finally meet you all in person, and I really hope I get the chance again!
I would also like to congratulate those that won awards related to course design at the conference. We have so many terrific instructional designers, multimedia developers, and instructors in Saskatchewan, and it is great to see many of you recognized for your hard work. Also, congratulations to the organizing committee for putting together a truly excellent conference.
On a less congratulatory note, to the people that continuously asked the question “what about the cyberpredators?” at almost every presentation, take some to read this or this or contact me, and I can help you get over this fear.
I would also love to have a conversation with the gentleman who voiced concerns (and then walked out) regarding teachers using decentralized funding to buy non-standardized equipment (as mentioned in Dean’s session) and the implications for sustaining technical support. I believe your point was that the purchasing should follow the institutional/division priorities. Here are my thoughts on this.
Start with division priorities that are focused on student learning and supporting innovation throughout the system. Let us forget the term “technical support” and focus on “innovation support”. Let us make the first term a misnomer. If a school division cannot (for instance) get Macs to play nice with a Windows network, your technicians are not doing their job, or they need to go back to training. Technology implementation decisions that are based on technicians’ lack of knowledge or vendor biases are not likely sound decisions. Divisions are learning organizations, and continual learning should be the expectation for all members. And if economics is the stated excuse, why not partner with other school divisions to increase cost-savings? Locking in to single vendor agreements to save tiny margins on the bottom line is ripping off your students, and IMHO, is inexcusable whether it is with Apple, IBM or CocaCola.
There is where I usually rant about open source software and free tools … but I will leave that argument for today.
re: ECMP 355
I am very happy to be teaching a May/June course to undergraduate students related to the appropriate integration of technology in the classroom. My students have begun blogging, and are starting to get the feel for it. Feedback and comments on their posts would be greatly appreciated, and you can subscribe to the ECMP 355 megafeed here.
For course interactions, we are using Moodle again. And, I do not believe it has been officially announced by the University of Regina is making a full move to Moodle from WebCT by Fall of 2009. I am happy to be currently testing the latest U of R release. If anyone would like to see the course, let me know and I will get you the guest password.
re: St. Louis
I am very excited to have been asked by Elizabeth Helfant to present at MICDS in St. Louis near the end of May. I will be speaking to English and History teachers (my original areas of study) regarding personal learning networks and technology integration. I can’t wait!
re: ICICTE in Corfu
I also have had my paper accepted for ICICTE in Corfu in July. I try to get back to Greece every couple of years to revisit my roots. This conference has been an excellent in the past and the venue is always on a Greek island. I highly recommend the country, the people, and the conference.
re: Life
Life is busy these days. I am currently in North Battleford, and teaching in La Ronge tomorrow (yes, on the long weekend) with our Community Based Masters of Education program. I am happy to have my family along with me for the rest of the trip and I am hoping to take some nice photos (and a few deep breaths) along the way. Northern Saskatchewan has much beauty to see. Here’s a shot I took near Battleford today.
Yes, I am extremely busy with teaching, research, presentations, and family. However, life is good and as I reflected in my last post, I am a lucky, lucky man.
I just noticed SlideRocket on ReadWriteWeb. SlideRocket is an online presentation application built on Adobe’s Flex platform. I got in on the limited Beta and this looks like a very promising app!
SlideRocket has everything you’d expect from a presentation app — powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, pretty transitions and image and video manipulations and animations, charting and table creation, and the ability to import PowerPoint files (export is coming soon). It also has some features you wouldn’t necessarily expect in an online application, like the ability to import your own fonts, a plugin architecture that will allow third-parties to create their own transitions and effects, and an offline Adobe AIR-based player (a full AIR-based version of the editor is also planned).
But where SlideRocket really shines it in its approach to community, sharing, and collaboration. Already active in the application is the concept of an asset library, where you can pull in assets (images, video, etc.) from any source, as well as directly from the web. Right now, SlideRocket searches Flickr and Yahoo! Images from inside the app and can add images it finds to the user’s asset library. (link)
Sign up for the limited Beta here.
A bit more than a week ago, some of the participants of EC&I 831 , a few other guests, and I had the fortune to be led through Second Life with Kirk Kezema as our personal tour guide. I have not had much experience with this virtual world, and so I thought it was best to have someone with a better understanding lead the tour. Kirk was an excellent choice, and he masterfully led our tour group through various Second Life locations including:
Kirk has blogged about the experience here. I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Kirk for the wonderful experience. I know it took some time setting up the tour for such a large group, and it really helped all of us better understand the educational potential of the tool. Thanks again!
Clarence Fisher was our guest presenter in EC&I 831 this week. Clarence was incredibly inspiring and he helped us all better understand how geographical characteristics, particularly remoteness, is no longer a barrier to rich, global learning opportunities.
The recorded Elluminate session is available. The Ustream version is also available below.
Thanks so much Clarence for being a part of our learning experience. I know you have gained many new fans, and we look forward to learning more from you in the future.
George Siemens delivered an excellent, information-packed presentation to the students of EC & I 831 this past Tuesday.
I also streamed a portion of my screen through uStream to a backchannel audience. Many tweeters came out to participate in the session.
Beyond the quality of the presentation, this was a neat experiment in video/presentation delivery/facilitation. Around 20 participants engaged in the conversation in Elluminate. More than 20 watched our class participate and engage in the material as George presented. A few of the more adventurous students (and their numbers are increasing) participated in both the Elluminate session, the ustream chat while posting thoughts to Twitter.
George spoke about connected knowledge. My students actively engaged in its creation.
I just finished watching Jonathan Harris’ TED Talk titled “The Web Secret Stories“. Harris works from the assumption that throughout humanity there is a shared need to express ourselves through various mediums. In the digital age, we have a unique opportunity of charting commonalities and differences in human expressions through innovative ways. Harris has developed some very intriguing visualization tools in this pursuit.
We Feel Fine demonstrates “a madly swarming mass of particles, each of which represents a single human feeling.” All of these “emotional expressions are stated by people”, and it’s amazing to see what is revealed through this visualization tool. By playing with the settings, madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics, and mounds, you can see some really neat results. Although I haven’t checked this for age appropriateness, a tool like this could have amazing potential in getting kids to write, responding to the impetus of a single, real, human emotion.
Universe is also another really interesting visualization tool that aims to “reveal our modern mythology”. I tried a few sample searches in this tool related to education, but sadly, the greater mythology (e.g., politics, presidential affairs, iraq) seems to overshadow anything relevant to my search. However, it is another neat tool. Both of these tools are described carefully in the TED video below.
Although he doesn’t mention it in his talk, Harris is also the developer of the older visualization tool “10X10“. I’ve always thought this was useful. (I believe there is something similar to this, but more powerful, anyone know that that is?)
This TED talk is worth watching if you are interested in visualization tools or looking at new ways of capturing the spirit of the times.
I’m sure that the majority of my readers know about this, but I am quite sure there are many than don’t.
This is a conference by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice. A goal of the conference is to help educators make sense of and meet the needs of a continually changing learning landscape.
It’s good to know that there is free registration, and that all sessions will be downloadable. I am sure there will be some amazing presentations and I’m really looking forward to participating in the sessions.
