Musings - Just Learning

It is exciting to be here at the University of Prince Edward Island to participate in this conference. I am sitting at a “blogger’s table” with Harold Jarche, Sandy McAuley, and Stephen Downes with Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow hovering the background. Will Richardson is delivering the keynote and he is going through it to demonstrate how the world is changing and the social technologies that are being used by students, teachers, ordinary folks and even politicians. He points out in particular how Obama is using social networking sites in order to promote his campaign. Physical space can be transcended and we can now have meaningful conversations with people around the world. Will makes the statement that model of journalism has to change - we can add our own information so easily so instantly. I really liked what he showed about how a teacher was using twitter to teach about the student uprising in Myanmar just two days ago. Students were able to view photos and videos of Burma within hours after the incidents took place.

Will also looks at how business is changing and shifting as they exploit these web 2.0 tools. His wiki page is worth exploring for the information he has collected there. He reminded us, too, of the digital divide still due to socioeconomic disparities.

I like the way Will shows off his blog as a place where HIS learning takes place. “It is a powerful learning network.” However, there is a disconnect between this kind of learning and what is going on in classrooms. He also shows off FanFiction and MySpace (not a good site - he shows it as a bad model of how young people are using such sites).

Will and I both twittered before his session that the conference could be found live at edtechtalk.com with an invitation to join. Within a few minutes three of my twitter peeps had come back to say they were following us - Graham Wegner in Australia, John Pederson in Minnesota, and Alice Wells in Maine. How cool is that?

I particularly appreciated how Will put a focus on the importance of AUDIENCE. This is often overlooked as having any pedagogical value for students, but I think it is one of the most powerful and compelling reasons we should be using web 2.0 tools and environments. I have said it before - I think all student-created material should be up online. However, this is based on the premise that the material has authentic value. He mentions three great Canadian educators who have been so innovative in creating new pedagogies around these tools - Clarence Fisher, Darren Kuropatwa and Konrad Glogowski - and I heartily concur.

He challenges us to be participatory together during these exciting times - and to build our own learning networks. We also need to be modeling our own learning to our students.

Last night on our WOW2 webcast, we had an impressive set of teachers with us to describe their plans and involvement in global projects for this academic year. Kristin Hokanson was effusive in her enthusiasm for using web 2.0 tools and getting teachers connected and involved. Her “Connected Classroom” wiki is very impressive - check out the video she has embedded in it.

Cheryl Lykowski, with whom I have been corresponding for a few months now, has just won an award for her impressive work on a master’s thesis project involving her students (in Michigan) in a podcast project with teachers and students in Colombia.

Another teacher whom I had invited, but was not able to join us last night, is Jennifer Meagher, a teacher who involved her Sherbrooke Québec high school students in a collaborative project with teachers and students in Uganda using the tools and environment from TakingITGlobal. Although she has since moved to another province in Canada, she is an enthusiastic proponent of global partnerships and knows of several classes around the world that are seeking partners this year.

While on the local level in my own setting I know of few teachers who are flattening their classroom walls to communicate and collaborate with students outside of their immediate environment, I am encouraged that this is changing. Opportunities for global collaborative projects abound and the tools of the Internet have never been easier to use!

Other projects/portals worth mentioning: Life Round Here (by Chris Craft), The Global Education Ning, and Teachers Without Borders.

IMPORTANT!!! If you have a great project that has used WEB 2.0 TOOLS, Terry Freedman asks that you would fill out this form so he can show off best practices examples with the upcoming Coming of Age - 2nd Edition. Please consider doing so - this way we can all share our students’ great work using these neato tools.

Below is a slideshow of a presentation I recently gave at the Literacy and Learning in the 21st Century conference in New Brunswick. I include slides of my own three teenagers who each use the Internet in very different ways - yet in ways that I believe are typical of our generation of youth today. All three of them are using tools and environments which permit them to collaborate and share with others not in their own immediate location. I included them in my presentation to demonstrate how teenagers are using the Internet as a means of communication and collaboration OUTSIDE of educational purposes. They do so easily and naturally, not because they are “geeks” (they would quickly cringe at that label!), but because that is how today’s teens are having fun and getting connected with their friends.

Check out the other portals mentioned in the slideshow if you are looking for an Internet Project or Global Partnership this year!

It has been much too long since my last blog post. When I lamented how far behind I felt in my writing recently to a friend, she wisely pointed out that my “life stress score” was probably pretty high. She went through the list - kitchen renovation, two parents and nephew in hospital, hosting a big family reunion, child leaving home for university, change of job, change of routine….. okay, okay!! I have been a little busier than usual in the last few months!

I don’t feel particularly stressed - everyone is now healing nicely, the kitchen reno went well, the family reunion was a big success and it looks as though I am going to thrive in my new job at LEARN. But there are times, recently, when I have found myself overwhelmed into paralysis.

Today, Dave Cormier asked me to read over his blog which is also a part of a presentation at the University of Prince Edward Island. It is a terrific post/presentation and should provide some good material for those of you who may have to make similar presentations. I decided to comment and the ideas just flowed out like a dam had broken.

Here is what I wrote:

A great presentation/blog, Dave! I liked your visuals and the embedded slideshow as well.

I have a few more thoughts about blogging for educational purposes - not if, but when, where and why, as well.

I used blogs with my high school students for the last three years in a variety of ways. As an English teacher, I am always looking for ways for my students to produce writing in authentic situations. Most of us are reluctant writers to begin with, so writing purposefully for a real audience makes a big difference in motivation and effort on the part of students. For the most part, traditional samples of writing would have an audience of one (the teacher), maybe two (if the student actually proof-read it!). With a blogging environment, the audience can be larger than just the members of the class. However, I have found that my students would *prefer* to write for an anonymous audience over their own peers - so powerful is the social force of peer groups in the teenage years! What I also discovered consistently over the three year period, was that the quality of writing improved greatly both between samples handed in for only my eyes and over time.

This was due, I believe, to a number of factors. First of all, the students were exposed to the quality of writing by the rest of the students. Suddenly the bar was raised. They could see for themselves what was good and mediocre (and just plain awful) writing. The students who perceived themselves as not quite doing a great job put a good deal more effort and care into their writing. I almost couldn’t believe the quality I was witnessing from some of those students! As well, they were also aware that they themselves now had an audience. This also motivated them to perform at their best.

Last year, I asked the headmaster of our school to read my students’ blog posts - at times in response to his weekly address - and he agreed. The very fact that the students were aware that the headmaster was going to read their blog posts also motivated them to really dig deep and write critically and thoughtfully. I was very impressed with much of what they had to say.

So when we talk about using online social spaces - such as blog or wikis - for communicating for educational purposes, I would have to say a very compelling reason is because of authentic audience.

I am very impressed with the new Québec Education Program that has now been completed in its mandate to provide a new curricula for the students of Quebec in the 21st Century. It explicitly states that the notion of text is no longer bound by words on a page (be it webpage or hard copy) but we now read other texts for meaning - visual texts, audio texts, multimedia texts. Literacy is now about making meaning from all available texts. Most blogging and wiki environments permit these texts (as you have shown on this blog post with your visuals and slideshow) to habitate all in one location in order to foster meaning-making for its audiences. Our students exist in a world where they are saturated with these texts. They have themselves become the producers also of these texts. I believe it is fundamentally important that we give them opportunities to produce content in meaningful, yet appropriate ways. This is another very important reason we educators should be using these tools and environments within the scope of our instruction.

I have also been blogging myself - though certainly not daily - for the last two years. I took it on as a way to prime the pump for my own thesis writing for a graduate degree. The discipline of blog writing has given me back much more than that. I have connected with educators I had no idea were out there. In fact, I am still surprised when someone says they are following my blog! The notion of an authentic audience who reads what I write is a powerful motivator; however, with it comes a responsibility of care for what I write and about whom. I work very hard not to betray the trust of my friends and colleagues as I write. It is very important to play nice and play fair when you are putting your thoughts “out there” on the Internet. This is about digital ethics - something I don’t believe we teach enough to our students. As they become producers of content, it gives them an opportunity to experience ownership of ideas - perhaps through this, it will give them a sense of the importance of copyright and avoiding plagiarism.

Thanks for giving me a chance, Dave, to thrash through some of my ideas and beliefs about the uses of blogging in education!

Some of the above ideas are greatly influenced by Dave Warlick who presented at a conference I attended a few weeks ago. We are crossing our fingers that he will be able to be our keynote speaker at a conference in Montréal in February!

Tonight on our WOW2 webcast we have a number of really terrific special guests lined up for a “super admin” show - Dr. Scott McLeod, Barbara Barreda, Chris Lehmann and Miguel Guhlin. Please join us at 9 PM EDT on edtechtalk - who just moved to a new server yesterday!

Or does it??

That thought just came to me as I was putting together a presentation for teachers in New Brunswick next week. I had been at it for hours - collating way too much material for a one-hour session. How can one share the rationale, the experiences, the opportunities, the tools, … the great benefits of global projects in just one hour?? How can I adequately describe my daily experiences with global educators through the tools of the web? On a day-to-day basis, it is quite typical for me to communicate with an average of 10 other teachers or educators from around the world. I just realized this the other day. In my world, this is the new normal - most of my online peeps would probably say about the same. Is this an echo chamber? I don’t think so. I am meeting new teachers (often very enthusiastic about these emerging technologies) every week and it is encouraging to see new faces and hear new voices.

It has been suggested that the global projects might come from the students. In fact, I was going to show my audience next week, how my three children use online environments and tools to communicate with friends from around the world. What do you think??

This past week provided a feast of experiences for me as I communicated, collaborated, shared and socialized with other educators from around the world - all from my backyard patio, where I sit now, writing by candlelight on a beautiful summer’s evening.

First of all, it was just plain wonderful to catch up on my blog reading this week. Since NECC and BLC, I have come across some bloggers who have shared solid insights and chewed on issues that I have often wrestled with - or offer new ones. It has been a particular treat for me to read Dean Shareski’s blogs. I kick myself later, many times, for not leaving comments on the blogs I read - I should teach myself to do it right then, because I never seem to get back to it.

While the blogs have been stimulating, it has been twitter that has been the highlight of most of my days. While others scratch their heads over twitter, I try to point out that it is not the tool, it is the QUALITY of the network of users that makes this work. The educators that I have linked with in twitter are exceptional, dedicated, innovative thinkers who freely share resources, offer feedback, provide emotional and intellectual support, pose thoughtful questions, stimulate interesting discussion, and, very importantly, often make me laugh. We are an inclusive community.

The real treat for me this week, though, was participating in the chatcasts to augment Darren Kuropatwa’s conference sessions in Denver, CO for a group of public school teachers. Darren was introducing the tools and pedagogies of web 2.0. He invited other educators (open invitation on his blog and twitter) to come along for the ride by participating in a skype conference chat during his presentation. Many of us had “backchanneled” like this at the Building Learning Communities Conference earlier this summer (where I had the pleasure of meeting Darren). I was unable to listen to Darren’s live presentation, but I did participate in the chatcast which he later posted on his wiki to the presentation. Once again, the chat was lively, interesting, relevant, supportive, reflective, and helpful, I hope, to the educators who were present there watching the chat emerge live on a projected screen. Talk about being risk-taking by a presenter!

Yet here was another example of globally-minded educators sharing, engaging in discourse, supporting, and collaborating with their peers - what a wonderful example for our students! What a privilege it is to hang with such innovative, boundary-pushing, articulate and creative educators (who are still learning)!

On the topic of backchanneling, I mentioned to Terry Freedman that my own daughter had used that technique a bit during her grade 12 math and science classes last year (even backchanneling her own father for help with math!), and he requested an interview with her which she granted. Her 18th birthday was celebrated just a few days ago and I am very proud of her articulate and intelligent responses to Terry’s badgering….. I mean… interview techniques. Just kidding, Terry! You and Elaine were very good interviewers!

Dr. Cheri Toledo and I had a skype conversation earlier this week which turned to this subject of backchanneling (instant-messaging during a lecture or presentation) as well. We decided it was a topic worthy of academic research and will start soon collecting data about it, possibly for publication in an academic journal. So many of us see some value in exploring this technique with our students - even in K-12 education. Unlike Miss Manners, I think it is not boorish behaviour second only to heckling. Please certainly add your comments to this discussion. Worthy of academic practice and study… or opening a Pandora’s box?

I have also been in contact, this week, with Noble Kelly, of Teachers Without Borders Canada, and hope to be able to provide some global partnerships to classes in Canada and South Africa. As well, I am trying to find partnership opportunities for some teachers who are looking for global collaborative opportunities in the upcoming academic year. If you are interested, or know of some opportunities, please contact me!

It’s happened again…. blog tagging is back. I was tagged by Charlene Chausis, who I met at NECC earlier this summer. Congrats, again, Charlene on your award!

Here are the Rules:

• Post these rules before you give your facts
• List 8 random facts about yourself
• At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
• Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Random Facts About Me:

1. I used instant messaging as early as 1987 when I worked at a computer centre on a university campus.
2. My husband asked me out on our first date over email…. in 1987.
3. My dream car would have standard transmission, not automatic.
4. I love peanut butter and chocolate ice cream.
5. My favourite number is 7 (and does not appear in any of my passwords!
6. I like to read murder mystery novels as brain candy.
7. My 60 GB ipod has only 175 songs on it (my kids are disgusted with me!).
8. In spite of being a proud Canadian, I really don’t like winter.

Phew! There!

And now, for eight poor blogging souls, I choose Reuven Werber, Chris Betcher, Graham Wegner
, Cheryl Oakes, Vince Jansen, Jeff Whipple and Meg Peters (is it considered cheating when you use your own daughter??).

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Bob Sprankle

Originally uploaded by Edublogger.

What a fun day of stimulating conversation and exchange of ideas!

Last night we enjoyed an evening of entertainment and levity on the Boston Harbour Dinner Cruise. I spent most of the dinner with new colleagues from LEARN finding out a bit more about my new job environment. Later I enjoyed some conversations with new friends who I had originally met at NECC.

I made it through most of the keynote session this morning by Dr. Yong Zhao who showed off a number of Internet trends such as youtube and Second Life. The compelling part of the session, for me and a few others, was the skype chatcast that quite a few of us were adding to. This phenomenon of backchanneling during sessions was even part of the topics we discussed. Yes, we poked a little fun at each other along the way (while David Jakes once again kept us on task), but we also enjoyed some powerful discourses about the speaker’s topic, the conference and the role of web 2.0 tools at such a conference.

I attended two sessions later in the morning - Darren Kuropatwa (New Tools, New Pedagogies - Developing Expert Voices), and Christian Long-Chris Lehmann (Designing High School 2.0). Again, we brought in a number of people into a skype chatcast (who were both in the session and off-site) and had amazing discourses about not just these sessions, but some others that were going on. Many said later about what an invigorating experience it was to have so many voices chiming in with their ideas, responses, experiences, and even dissents. I have to say it was one of the most intellectually stimulating experiences I have had for some time. Definitely a high point was when George Siemens came into the chat and we had a lively discussion about sustainable change in an educational environment and the affordances of a laptop as a tool.

Later, at lunch, I had the great privilege of having Bob Sprankle - Podcast Guru - show me how to use Garage Band on my new MacBook Pro. Wheeee! Imagine having private tutorials with Dave Warlick for pro-blogging tips and Bob Sprankle for podcasting tips all in one summer! Somebody pinch me!

Much more so than NECC 2007, I found most of the sessions promoted or used web 2.0 tools for educational purposes. One would certainly get the impression that a LOT of educators are using these tools in the classroom. However, in many of the audiences of the sessions I attended it was clear that many, many teachers (who were attending this tech-oriented conference) were NOT familiar with these tools and were clearly not using them. We have certainly not reached any kind of saturation point with comprehension of such things as rss feeds, podcasts, and skype. We have a long way to go, baby.

I am so glad I came to BLC this year! This conference has quite a different feeling from NECC which I attended a few weeks ago in Atlanta. True, I had something like five public presentations while I was at NECC and I also got swept away by the Bloggers’ Café opportunities for social sharing. I had arrived in Atlanta the day after my last day of school - so I was quite exhausted during and after.

The week before NECC I made an impulsive decision to attend the Building Learning Communities Conference - mostly because of the reasons stated above. I had scanned the names on the presenters’ list and knew this was going to be an opportunity for some very rich and engaging stimulation. And I have not been disappointed.

Tim Tyson, principal of Mabry Middle School in Georgia was the opening keynote speaker. Below are some notes I had sketched out during the presentation. He is a modest, articulate, engaging speaker whose passion for his students, his teachers and his school clearly shines through.

Tim Tyson discusses the importance of relevance in education - how project-based learning that connects students with other people and places in the world is RELEVANT and how the evaluation of it is authentic to both the learner and the teacher.

He stressed the importance of having students make meaningful and valuable contributions to the world - when do we contribute something meaningful or significant - when we are adults - or is it right now (for students)? Let’s make it a choice rather than default.

Tim gives example of authentic relevant learning, the student video of stem cell research - alarming topic - but students were on fire for the topic. They were challenged to create a video that would capture the importance of the issues and communicate that to the audience in a 2 minute video.

The first session I attended was Reel Celtic Connections by Ewan McIntosh. I audio-recorded the presentation and hope to have that podcast up and available soon. I had read Ewan’s blog and listened to a number of podcasts where he has shared his ideas, so I was prepared for some solid depth. The title can be misconstrued. His presentation focused on the educational changes that have taken place over time in Scotland and how he strongly believes we need to be addressing this generation of students who have been raised in the era of the Internet. Ewan also stresses that changes to educational systems have to be done at the LOCAL level - there is no one size fits all - but the culture and situation of the system should be taken into account. He is not a believer, he says, in school 2.0 or classroom 2.0 for this reason. This challenged me to take a critical look at my own cultural situation in Québec that need to be examined as we reshape our educational landscape to better suit our students.

Ewan’s presentation was augmented with video clips and a google earth visit to Scotland. One big take-away for me was the government inspectorate report that Scotland recently released that summarized data which demonstrated that emerging technologies are making the biggest technologies impacts on schools! We need to get that word out!

Will be collating my notes to the other sessions I have attended soon! Two more days to go! Wow!

On a social note, I am having a grand time meeting such peeps as Darren Kuropatwa, Dean Shareski (fellow Canadians), Ewan McIntosh, and others - some of whom I was able to have dinner with last night.

Karl Fisch - Did You Know He Was a Best Buy? NECC 2007

Originally uploaded by sharonpe.

Sorry, Karl - I couldn’t resist the title!

While we were in Atlanta at NECC 2007, a bunch from the bloggers’ café poked fun at the HUGE Best Buy bags that were being given out and we had our pics taken in the bags. To see more bagged bloggers, check out the photos with the tag “bagged, necc2007, (or) necc07″.

With time to catch a breath or two in my schedule, my somewhat relaxed mind has returned to blogging thoughts. I am here in Mont Tremblant resort at a family lodge with my husband’s family reunion enjoying the Blues Festival (free outdoor stages with cool blues bands playing throughout the day), the lovely environment and great weather.

Today I took the opportunity to listen to a podcast from NECC 2007 as I walked a trail around the resort. Lori Burch does a great job of summarizing, synthesizing and evaluating several sessions from the Monday of NECC 2007.

Lori summarized and gave her take on the presentation entitled “21st-Century Learners Design Ultimate School of the Future Today” by Julie Evans which provided the results to the speakup survey conducted nationally by Project Tomorrow (alas, American nationally - not internationally) by willing schools. The survey is an ongoing project by tomorrow.org.

The central theme of the NECC presentation was the necessity of listening to the voices of the students as they articulate what the school of the 21st century should look like.

Julie Evans reported that the students who responded to the survey, our current generation of young Internet users, stated that *communication* was the number one motivation for why they used online tools. It was their desire to create and sustain relationships that drove them to use the Internet. Wow! This is my main motivation too! As I listened to the results to the survey, I found that my own forty-something experiences and motivations were quite similar to those reported by an overwhelming majority of teens.

From an educational perspective, this desire for sociality can be tapped for successful global projects. It reinforced my own experiences that students welcome an opportunity to communicate and establish relationships with students in other places around the world.

Lori reported that the most interesting aspect to the NECC presentation was the student panel that followed Julie’s report on the data results. Real students were there to voice their opinions and share their ideas about 21st education. Those students, just as I have found with my own students, were surprisingly practical and exhibited a good deal of common sense. They saw the potential of technology to further their learning experiences and offered some suggestions as to how to make this a reality. Without overtly saying so, they wanted the technology to become “invisible” and ubiquitous to all. They wanted less training on software and Internet tools and more access to the technology hardware (i.e. laptops and cell phones) and teachers. They stated their desire for good teaching practices (i.e. teachers! please update those homework webpages regularly!) and teachers who were accessible outside of class time.

The students were less concerned with Internet safety and more concerned with ethical online behaviours (i.e. plagiarism and bullying) which, to me, is in keeping with the (inter)national statistics about the dangers of online predators and the need for a course in digital ethics.

Lori also reported on the session about historical digital story-telling and is interesting as well, but not quite as compelling as listening to the voices of real students. All in all, I was quite grateful to learn vicariously through Lori’s audio report. Thanks, Lori!

Many of you are aware that my life has been choc-a-bloc full of activities in the last few weeks. Not only did I go through those crazy last few weeks of classes and exams with two parents in hospital (hundreds of miles away), present at NECC on three occasions, and start a new job, but I also had the awesome task of arranging and hosting a family reunion for my husband’s family (15 kids, 10 adults) - none of whom are local to us, but traveled from such diverse places as Ireland and Dubai. We are now all at the resort town of Mont Tremblant in the Laurentian mountains of Québec and I can catch my breath for a moment or two.

I just now FINALLY uploaded my photos from NECC 2007 to Flickr and what special memories they brought back!

Here is a collection of some of them:

bagged, utecht, walsh,

I was only very briefly able to get the edubloggercon yesterday at the Georgia International Convention Centre. However, from what I saw, it was like a distilled version of NECC itself with all kinds of people whose blogs and activities I have been following for the past year. It was especially exciting to meet so many of our WOW2 webcast guests face-to-face!

Last night a few of us had dinner on the revolving restaurant at the very top of the Westin. Terry Freedman, editor of Coming of Age, Cheryl Oakes, Julie Lindsay, Vicki Davis, Kathleen Malsbenden, Vince Jansen and Deb Barrows were those amongst our group and the conversation, as you can imagine, was rich and full of laughter. What a thrill and privilege to hang out with such an incredible group of educators.

Now I am at Dave Warlick’s fantastic all-day workshop on Advanced Blogging (all right, true confession - he is making us do this blog entry as an assignment!). Already I am picking up some great ideas and resources! To benefit from the wealth of resources collaboratively made available to us, you can visit the workshop wiki.