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Mary Cullinane, Technology Architect spke at NECC panel on future of ed
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Awesome choreographer from NY, spoke at panel on future of ed at NECC, killer stuff
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Andrew Zolli’s firm, keynote speaker at NECC 2007\
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Goning to use it on my school site for blogging by teachers and students
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Vendors
There are a lot. Check it out.
Apples, Apples, Apples
I know the numbers for Apple in ed has been dismal for the past few years but I saw a lot of Macs in the hands of a lot of teachers. While it may not have been even with the PC crowd, I would guess at a good third of them. But they were everywhere. The other appealing thing was that many vendor had at least included them but also used them exclusively. And with Parallels, they were showcasing their wares on XP as well.
I also saw a lot of HP in peoples hands. It goes with the recent numbers that HP has overcome Dell in that market.
It was also telling that the Apple booth mainly had their computers on display while Dell partnered with third parties to demonstrate what could be done on their machines. Add to that was that much of those thrid party apps were offered by Apple as well.
The members of the booth team at Apple were also the most laid back, friendly crowd compared to just about everybody else. They just let the product sell it self.
Attendance
From accounts I have heard that this conference has been small. 4000 or so. This year it is packed. Standing room only in many sessions. I have walked away from four now because I was only 15 minutes early. It is nifty for the level of excitement. I don’t think there has been this much synergy in tech for ed in a bit. Web 2.0 is on just about everybody’s lips and open source is big buzz as well.
Keynote Panel
I went to the follow up panel to the opening keynote. Hosted by Zolli and filled with creative types. Posted links yesterday to most of their sites. It was a bit of let down. Most panel discussions have a bit more back and forth. Even a little tension but this one was a bit stiff. Someone made mention when we were talking about it later, that it would have been great to have presented the opening statements at the end of the keynote to let them ferment for a day and then gather questions from attendees the next day or so. The moderator could till pick through them and made they would have been more engaging.
I got the most out of their opening statements with Streb and Pedro making the most impact. Pedro makes a comment that was the most shocking. In his studies students with computers at school, test scores went down. But with computers at home, scores went up. Wow. Streb, with her space and physics bending dance, challenge questioned that we should dare people to think and try the impossible in that you do the best stuff in the process.
What I am taking away
I found that Adobe has kicked Captivate in the ass in the new version and it is worth every penny. Simply record a software action, it records the steps, notates and exports in a flash movie instantly. Dude, we are going on line with professional development. (I know some might dig Snag It for the price, but this is way beyond).
Mimio is cheap and killer for the price.
Open source (wordpress, drupal and moodle) is what I am focusing on this year.
And the bottom line is Information.
That is the currency and product we should be training kids for in the new economy. Web 2.0 is all about the data. XML, API, RSS, AJAX, and every other acronym is about data and how you use it. Ed is still stuck on the tally list of skills, mastery sheets and standardized tests.
We’ve dabbled in connecting to the world, the global learner concept. But sharing and talking isn’t the end. A connection is only possible if you have the conduits for connection and it only becomes meaningful if you have the right info. The conversations they have on Myspace eventually will move into the work place and they need to have the tools to sort the mass of info coming at light speed and then make it into something useful and new.
Global and micro-local is becoming a mirror image in many ways but figuring out the difference is growing harder. Streb mentioned making an environment where failure is okay. I want one where it is okay. That it is the process for learning. Teachers need to stop fearing the tools. The kids will figure it out. Teachers have the info. Trade. Barter. And let the kids do rather than making them work.
Technorati Tags: Atlanta, education, n07s755, NECC2007, Apple, puppy, technology
behold the beauty of water squirting in sync to classical music. oh joy!!
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Technorati Tags: Atlanta, Centennial Park, NECC2007, Olympic
Well I missed a few scheduled sessions yesterday. The first was the morning one. Hard to move that fast in the morning but I wasn’t all that hot on it. Since I was running late I hit the flashing lights and sweet talking of the vendor booths.
Vendor Booths
They are more aggressive than I have ever experienced. The used car salesman tactics are in full swing. If you happen to move slightly their direction they grab you and begin to yell their wonders to you. They glad hand you as you make a pile of excuses and they slap a larger pile of gloss rags in your hand as you run screaming to the next trap booth.
What gets me is that the products are really static. Nothing is making me tingle in any way. It even seems the software developers are a bit down too. It has been a dry spell for a few years as far as the money flowing from districts and I think it is taking its toll.
Software wise, it is still the throw more features at it model rather than fixing the UI quirks or touting a nifty redesign that focuses on rounded edges and cartoony graphics.
Open Source
What is nifty has been the big presence of open source in the conference. You can see from the photo that the crowd had exceeded fire code by the start. Moodle, of course, is the big draw but the fact that they have moved from a shared room to a space of their own this year is great. Budgets suck and they are bad right now. This is the best way, I believe to start bring the real world in. The big community of developers that work on these thing are better than the one tech support person per region that the corporations are giving.
The other sessions
I skipped the copyright stuff, I a already to the brim with that stuff. Since things have only gotten worse I stuck with the flashing lights of the booth. A conference buddy checked out the AFI session and turns out it was just showing what was on united streaming. Nifty. I will have to explore for that. It is a lot of how to’s for film and video creation covering the writing process, directing and is geared for the classroom. A real world connection and ease to get.
Other observations
One cool thing that ISTE did in setting it up was the creation of Technorati tags for the conference and the individual sessions. I noticed last night that I got a bit of traffic from it. But what I did notice that it wasn’t that great. Either people are not checking it out or that the ed crowd is still not entirely connected in that way yet.
Other junk
We went to a fancy, smancy restaurant last night and watched the nifty water show in Centennial Park that is across the street. I will post that video when it is ready.
Technorati Tags: education, n07s589, n07s659, NECC2007, technology
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We hit the coffe daily, gonna dump a few on the new roses
National Educational Computing Conference 2007
Well, Atlanta is hot but I am spending it in the AC geeking it out with a bunch of teachers. We are already a nerdy bunch but now we take it up to the next level by obsessing over computers for a week.
Last night’s keynote was given by Andrew Zolli of Z+ Plus Partners. A “futurist” and consultant, Zolli was a pretty good show. His message was more a less a push for teachers and education to start looking at information as the product that we are preparing kids to produce for the next 50 years. Starting with the idea that soon computers will do just about everything for us and that leaves the human race with creativity as the one thing that we still can’t get from machines. A resetting of our definitions of innovation and thinking was another theme. Moving out of the individualist approaches we have been successful with for millennia are now about to be outdated with the information age. Networking thought patterns and abilities are needed now. It isn’t really a shift from one but more of an evolution to this new way of working. The end thought I got from it was that we are going to be teaching creativity as much as any skill in the future.
The big thing from me is to hear some one say that to ed people. Ed is reactionary by default. You come with a plan for a year or two and then have to check how far off you were in the end. We often miss changes in the social and economic fabric too often. Thanks to the inter-tubes more people are plugged in and on the front edge of large trends faster. Education needs to develop frameworks of teaching philosophy that emphasize flexibility as much as results and become more prescriptive to not just the child’s needs but the real world nature of the tasks we are training them for.
As for the rest of the week here is my schedule for the concurrent sessions:
Today
11:00am-12:00pm AFI Screen Education Center: Digital Filmmaking in the Core Curriculum
12:30-1:30pm Copyright in the Multimedia Age: An Online Resource
2:00-3:00pm Five Obstacles to Information Fluency (and How to Remove Them)
Tuesday, June 26
8:30-9:45am Tuesday Keynote Panel
11:00am-12:00pm Using the IBM Change Toolkit to Manage Change
12:30-1:30pm New Tools, New Schools: Starting the Conversation about Web 2.0
2:00-3:00pm Games and Simulations for Teaching and Learning
3:30-4:30pm Constructivist Teaching with Technology: Learning with Laptops
Wednesday, June 27
10:30-11:30am Digital Portfolios: Demonstrating Standards without Standardization
12:00-1:00pm Is Your Web Site Accessible?
I might add more but I will drop a line about anything nifty in the mean time.
Technorati Tags: education, n07s616, NECC2007, technology
Kid #1: Paper beats rock. BAM! Your rock is blowed up!
Kid #2: “Bam” doesn’t blow up, “bam” makes it spicy. Now I got a SPICY ROCK! You can’t defeat that!
–6 Train
via Overheard in New York, Nov 6, 2004
I get through at least two books a summer. I know some people pound through them but I also spend summer time doing all the house maintenance that I have ignored for the other ten months. This summer I have stepped it up and put myself out there with three books. It is a bit of a cheat, I have already two before. But having finished one and half way through the other two I can recommend them all. With out further ado:
This is one of my favorite books having read it for at least the third time. Thompson’s journey through the colon of America in a search for the American Dream is a mind fuck of a drug trip. It details the myth and true promise of the drug counter-culture, open minds versus wrecked minds. Often passed off as a comedic genius this is really a rip into the fabric of society that permeated America coming out of the free love, free drug Sixties.
Screaming through Sin City on mescaline, coke, booze and even human hormone pulled from a living adrenal gland, the duo (Raol Duke and his attorney) expose the out of touch authorities and the broken dream of the decade before.Iidentifying Nixon as the start of America’s bad trip he stumbles through the rest in a haze that is now merely trying to avoid the inevitable collapse. Starting on search he ends on a run from the horrors of what he finds.
I tried hard to have my own reenactment in college. Fear and Loathing could never be truer in totally nailing the “free mind” drugs give you. It also gives good insight to those friends that could not realize the bad news and walk out of the trip. Assailed by the imaginary bats and and almost real dragons of the casino, I wanted to stay myself.
Checking Amazon, the first item was the movie. Dude, the book is so much better than the movie, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Criterion Collection” (Terry Gilliam), could ever be. It might be tempting to short cut this one for the movie but the rambling mess of story is easy to follow in the book but makes a mess of a visual story. The best deal is to read the book and just browse the movie, checking out the scenes that are the most interesting. I do have to admit the opening scenes in the car on the road to Las Vegas made me laugh my ass off.
“Trouble Is My Business” (Raymond Chandler)
I love Chandler. The hard-boiled PI maybe isn’t his invention and it is hard pressed to figure anyone else out that can do it better. Maybe a bit of Dashiel Hammett, Complete Novels, whose Red Harvest puts the violent films of today to miserable shame. Trouble is a collection of shorts featuring the beloved Philip Marlowe, who always seems to find himself tangled in a mess that is a mile deeper than it ever started out. The language is sparse and drove American literature a bit to the edge it became in later novels. Partly because of Chandler being a Brit and not really knowing the American dialect, he sort of made it up.
The best part of are the continuously flawed characters Chandler creates. Hollywood actors, Las Vegas gamblers, tycoons and misfits of all types swirl together in mayhem that is understated and portrays what America felt about Los Angeles and its participants of the 30′s and 40′s. It is timeless though. Many situations could very well happen in the Hollywood Hills of 2007. And you end up liking them all somehow. He is sympathetic but still manages to give every one a dose of the medicine they deserve. Marlowe is the morals the story and also the amoral example, in it for himself at many times.
I I had to picked this one up after Christina made funny of me for picking up the The Long Goodbye for the twentieth time.
“Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” (David Allen)
I know the GTD crowd is about to achieve cult status but the problem is that the stuff works. I began digging in because of the mountain of email I had been getting between personal and my Colonialtown stuff. Add in the fact that the spam engines had ensnared me, I ended up getting 200 to 300 emails per day. I began looking for nifty ways, smart folders and rules etc., to handle them and to weed through the 90% spam rate. GTD sites kept coming up. I realized that my time management was part of the problem and began delegating the email sorting and the such to certain times.
Well, work has also been an issue. Sites like 43folders and lifehacker highlight the tips from Allen to use in the workday. I have fought for a method to the madness at work. They have downsized my department from two to one. I need something to handle the issues that tend to pore in. It is a squeaky wheel culture. I decided to pick up GTD and give a read. I am half way through and dig it.
First, it deals with the inflow of request that bely you daily. The idea of setting time a side to respond to email, phone calls and such is tremendous. Since that is how my issues come in I was at the mercy of the most recent and scatter logical order. It is all common sense and flexible to an extent. Also the time management seems counter to what we have been taught but it focuses on giving the most time to productivity and continuous work rather than the weird lists we tend to work from.
Second, and the best part is that it maintains principles rather that methods to work through the system. This means you can modify it to fit how things have to be done. It focuses on working down to the simplest solution or process to get through the project. It also lays out the common sense questions you ask yourself when the junk flows in, is this something I need to do, when and how, etc. Plus the best rule is the two-minute rule, if it can be done in two minutes, doit right away. Just trying hard to implement that has been a boost.
The focus is off of adding more junk like technology and sticking to the framework you establish. The hipster PDA and old school concepts like an inbox seem common sensical and like duh moments but it is refreshing from all the complex crap we throw at things to work better.
Technorati Tags: books, fear and loathing, getting things done, GTD, hunter s. thompson, raymond chandler, reviews
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