Ed Tech Connection

I have arrived in San Antonio, TX, for my annual trip to NECC.  I am so excited to learn as always.  NECC is my own primary source for professional development.  It's one of the highlights of my hear.

Of course, having it in San Antonio is fantastic!  I love this city.  I was hear several years ago for NCTM and am thrilled to be back.  

This is also my first NECC since going to work for TIES.  It brings a different emphasis to how I am looking at the sessions, exhibit hall, etc.  Right now I am sitting in the ISTE Affiliate Meeting, representing TIES.  This is a fantastic opportunity to learn in new areas.

On the subject of TIES, we have created a group blog for the Learning & Technology diAs vision of TIES.  Greg, Marla, Troy, Heather, Ron and I will all be blogging there on items related to our work.  Since I am at NECC on TIES behalf, my NECC posts will largely be there.  Click to link to the new TIES Learn Tech Blog to follow all of our posts.  Greg, Marla, Troy, and I are here at NECC - or will be if they all ever get here!  However, all of us will be continuing our blog after NECC.  Enjoy and let us know what you think.

To show how much Texas culture I've soaked up already, I'll say, "Stop back another time now, y'all."

Peter Koel and Scot Sahs, MN State Colleges & Universities
3D Learning Environments
Concurrent Session
e-Learning Summit 2008
Bloomington, MN

Four different approaches:  Wonderland, Croquet, SecondLife, Behind the Message

Project:  Next Generation Technology

Sun Microsystem’s Wonderland (MPK20) – free open source download to run on a PC or a server

• 3D scene manager for creating collaborative virtual worlds
• Advantage is it is open source and customizable
• Disadvantage is that you have to support it yourself
• Three parts:  Voice Bridge (very audio focused), Server (runs on the PC or server that runs the software), and Client (your access)
• Not developed for education – developed by Sun as a virtual working environment and they do use it virtually to collaborate on projects.
• You are able to use real applications like Word and PPt collaboratively in world.
• They have mixed reality and virtual  environments via video conference embedded in world that allows the video participants to interact with the avatars.
• It is NOT out of the box ready.  You have to have someone build the environment, the objects, etc.
• Free
• Windows but may not be VISTA and Macintosh

Croquet – open source developed by Carnegie Melon,

• Intermediate Spanish demonstration by U of M faculty
• Free
• Lots of resources, but you have to be able to program to get involved
• Windows, but not VISTA
• QWAQ – commercially available interface that is now available as well.

Second Life – Free, but owned by Linden Labs.  Everything you create in SL is the property of Linden Labs – no intellectual property rights for faculty

• Faculty and colleges campuses currently teaching classes:  3 in MN, including MNSCU Island
• To have land you have to purchase it and build on it.
• Teen Grid – ages 13-17 year old access
• It was designed for social networking – designed to replace facebook and myspace
• See Smithsonian island
• Windows and Macintosh

Behind the Message – Developed for a journalism professor at the U of M by the Johnson Center of Virtual Reality

1. Simulation that has the avatar work to find information and write an article about it.
2. Tasked based with a decision tree – answers can lead forward or circle back to the original questions (leads to anger – emotion embedded).
3. Built using a $20,0000 grant – this is not available publicly
4. Assessment is tied into how the options are weighted and how often the avatar goes back to the beginning

Milton Luoma, Jr., Metropolitan State University
Vicki Luoma, Minnesota State University (not present today but helped develop)
Closing the Loop: Making Students Partners in Assessment
Concurrent Session
e-Learning Summit 2008
Bloomington, MN

Goals:  Started by creating assignments students should be able to make.  They related to topics like leadership, writing, recognizing issues, and analyzing problems using information technology and research methods.

Culminating Assignment: Every student is responsible for writing a paper in which he or she identified goals, identify which learning activity satisfied that goal, and then explained how he or she could use that knowledge in the future. OR  In the alternative if the student didn’t feel he or she met that goal, he or she had to explain why not, what kind of activity would have satisfied that goal, and how important that goal would have been to have bee satisfied. Basically, it’s a reflection paper.

Dr. Michael Wesch
A Portal to the Future of Education
Concurrent Session
e-Learning Summit 2008
Bloomington, MN

Looking at the creation of the tools like dig, youtube, google, blogger, etc.  There are no digital natives here because the tools aren’t old enough.  There’s a lack of digital nativeness even among our “digital natives”

Technology is increasing exponentially every year – speed, access, etc.  In relationship they are shrinking in size at the same rate.

Social networks are increasing exponentially as well – printing press through the web was hundreds of years and blog to ning was a few years.

Information about everything – Two dimensional barcodes, radio-frequency ID (RFID) chips imbedded into items:  both of these allow you to connect from physical items to the web that you can use your cell phone to access.

The Web is increasingly coming into our physical space so we’re in a way “in the web” all the time.  We need our students to understand this relationship as media literacy.

A
ubiquitous
context-aware,
semantic,
social network of
things,
people,
and
information.

Have we prepared our students to create this world? – this isn’t a download culture – it’s an upload culture

Creating platforms for participation that allow students to realize and leverage the existing media environment.

Do not use so much technology in your class that the classroom becomes about the technology instead of about the learning.  Keep the technology transparent.

He has created a platform for his classroom portal (he made a CMS that is based on open source widgets):  http://www.netvibes.com/wesch It includes Facebook, a news aggregator about the topic of anthropology, a wiki, twitter feed, and diigo, collaborative video creation/uploading
The wiki allows all the students in the class collaborate on many items, including lecture notes. He creates only a few points to allow them a starting point.  Together the students create a better set of lecture notes than he would.  Students create it during the lecture, following the lecture, and as they prepare for exams, etc.  They write, link, and embed things such as YouTube videos.  He finds it interesting what they write, highlight, and take away from his lectures as well as where they go with them; he’s able to see what they find important and significant and applies that to exams, etc.  They can also use the discussion of the wiki as the course discussion.  He uses WebPaint as a wiki and that is integrated into netvibe.

Facebook integration is used via the iPhone embedding.

Link sharing via diigo goes beyond del.icio.us to the opportunity to highlight and annotate we sites.

Enabling students to
Share notes
Talk back
Talk to each other
Study together
Share discoveries
Find latest research
Co-create the course
Collaborate

His large class of 200 students creates their own simulation of the entire human culture from the year 1400 to 2050.  They design and develop their cultures on the wiki, physically live the simulation based on the rules they’ve created, then upload the results to the wiki and discuss it and compare it with our real world history and culture.  They’ve done the simulation about 7 times now and 5 times they ended in world war and twice they ended in world peace.

In the world
And for the world
That realizes
And leverages
The emerging
Media environment

Beyond the metaphor of the “portal”

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

How do they do citations? – He lets them learn about traditional citation in other classes and explore new ideas in his.  Used a Diigo feed to tag anything they found related to their culture/topic.  This takes the idea of annotated bibliography farther by allowing the instructor to read the discussion they held online regarding the resources and their application to the project.

How can we handle and cope with the increase in information and knowledge?  We have to accept that we can’t and don’t need to know it all.  We have to organize it instead so that we can access it when we need.  There’s a big need for filtering – he says his best filter is his twitter feed to watch what others are exploring and use that to know what he wants to see – let others tell him what’s relevant.

Where can we follow or review what you’ve seen?  Go to netvibes.com, start an account, and start playing around.  Get a sense of the possibilities.

How is your work impacting your tenured colleagues?  It depends on their motivation to engage students.

Dr. Michael Wesch
Human Futures for Technology and Education
Keynote Address
e-Learning Summit 2008
Bloomington, MN

Dr. Wesch has had very successful experiences making and publishing videos on YouTube like Web 2.0 Explained Through Inventive Video

His experience with creating video content in his basement and publishing them on YouTube.  In just one weekend it went from just published to most viewed.

• User-Generated Content – YouTube
• User-Generated Filtering - Digg
• User-Generated Organization – del.icio.us
• User-Generated Distribution – RSS
• User-Generated Commentory – Technorati
• User-Generated Ratings – Technorati #1

YouTube Video - History of Education from the future of year 2020, starting with the year 387 BC. Predicts Google owns University of Phoenix in 2008, Screen Actors Guild starts a college in 2012 because actors have more credibility than teachers, Play Station 6 in 2016, Google Phoenix merges with Linden Labs in 2017 to create a simulated education,

All futurists agree that . . .
Ubiquitous networks, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous information, unlimited speed, about everything, everywhere from anywhere, on all kinds of devices.
Yet so many people still completely ignore this expectations.

Lessons from New Guinea

Future of higher ed

• Impacted by broad socio-technological change
• Driven by a search for solutions (invention)
• Mediated by legacy structures (convention) – for example the teaching is limited by the space

The most significant problem in higher education is the problem of significance itself

• How many do not actually like school? (his results from his informal survey – over half)
• How many do not like learning? (his results from his informal survey – none)
• What do you do instead? (buy textbooks I never open, paying for classes and not showing up, completing only 49% of readings, only see 26% relevant to life)
• Faculty comments include “some students are just not cut out for school,” is a ridiculous statement if you think of school as learning.  We’d never say, “some students are not cut out for learning”

Issues with the problems of significance are many, but this will focus on technology as an issue and as a cultural gap.

Media are not just tools, not just methods of communicate, but they actually mediate relationships.

(All of what he relates here is actually quoted from the 200 students in one of his classes.)

• Writing on a chalkboard –
• What’s missing? – no photos/videos/animations/network,
• What’s there? - encourages teacher to move from podium, think on the go, limits class sizes to those who can see the board.
• PowerPoint is Different – easy, mindless, fast, linear, helps presenter remember notes while often doing great harm to the presentation, encourages students to memorize key points, let the professor decide which points should be key and how to return those points on an exam.

Edward Tufte – "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

Predictions for 200 years have said teaching will have to change to meet the needs of society, but teaching has not really changed. 

Students are always sitting in rooms.  If the walls of the classrooms could talk, what would they say?

• To learn is to acquire information.
• Information is scare and hard to find so that’s why you have to come to this special room.
• You have to trust authority for good information.
• Authorized information is beyond discussion.
• Obey the authority.
• Follow along.

What students say in these walls - (great questions drive the learning, but these don’t drive them anywhere . . . these limit instead).

• How many points is this worth?
• How long does this paper need to be?
• What do we need to know for the test?

Something in the air is indicating change

• Web is all around us through wireless computer access, cell networks, etc. It undermines all those ideas that “rooms” seems to say

Marshall McLuhan – “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

 

Saving in folders . . .

• On paper we thought of information as a thing with a material form that you could point to and organize into libraries
• Yahoo was the first real search that imitated libraries in how it organized and presented locations of information – everything had to be in one category.
• Hyperlinking showed us that information could be in more than 1 place at a time.
• Google broke down hierarchies.
• Blogging taught us that anybody can create information which has since moved to audio, video,
• Wikipedia shows that by working together in new ways we can create information that rivals the content of experts.  Kevin Kelly – “Nobody is as smart as everybody.”  The authority of wikipedia comes from the justification in the discussion.  
• Diigo now allows us to make a web 1.0 web site a web 2.0 site by the notes and information we can note.
• Tagging is allowing us to make information more available and easier to find – RSS teaches us that information can find us which is a new kind of “information literacy.”

Our method of assessment – filling in little bubbles – is completely out of date.  Every question on those tests can be answered on a cell phone by texting google so we need new ways to learning

To Learn needs mean to create significance.

How do we do that?

Creating platforms for participation to realize this significance – face to face and online.

Philosophy of this is based on 3 possibilities:

• Network logic – participation (where our students are and we need to go)
• Hierarchy logic – authority
• Mass Logic – follow along
  

I am at the e-Learning Summit today at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN.  It is exciting to see hundreds of K-12 and higher education professionals interested in coming together to learn and share about education technology.

I will post my notes throughout the day and/or tomorrow as wireless internet access becomes available!   In the interest of timeliness, please forgive the roughness of these notes.  The blogger in me wants them published.  The English teacher wants to revise them four times.  Blogger wins!

In addition, I am presenting a session at the conference along with Dr. Vivian Johnson from Hamline University.  Check out the wiki for our session.   

Getting Started with Geotechnology

Sara Damon
Stillwater Junior High  

Why Bother?

• Spatial thinking
• Spatial Data Awareness
• Standards
  

GIS

GPS

You can bring GPS data into your GIS

• Geocaching
• Earthcaching
• Waymapping
  

Remote Sensing

• Aerial Photography
• Satellite Photography

Internet Map and Image Servers - easy place to get started

•  Virtual Globes:  Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer
• Free downloadable GIS Software from ESRI
• ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education - FREE! and basic - a good starting point
• Minnesota Environmental Atlas - free online - True North is the web based application
• In partnership with MN Historical Society - maps and lessons available
  
• ArcGS 9.x for PC, 1 year site license comes with a lesson plan book, $500
• You can win a free site license by participating in a contest
• New series coming from ESRI at four different levels:  elementary, middle, high school, college

How to use Desktop GIS with kids

• Begin with lessons prepared by others to match their curriculum
• ArcLessons website
• Our World GIS SEries
• Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators
•  Once comfortable, move on to creating own lessons or even having kids create lessons

What are some examples of what to do with kids? Explore topics like these, identify questions to answer, create maps to demonstrate answers to them, publish the maps to the web

• Map where things are
• Map quantitites
• Map densities
• Map what's inside
• Map what's nearby
  

Sara's students have done partnership projects with Firewise through the DNR (curriculum and training available), and mapping the Bluebird houses in their community.

Annotated maps Using Google My Map

• Commodity Chain Map - annotated maps tracking the path of the agricultural commodities from all over the world
• Coffee, bananas, coconuts, chocolate, and more
  
• Place marks, text, images, (YouTube Videos also on PC only)
  
• Then looked at each others' maps, compared them, and used them to answer a variety of questions
• Uploaded their created maps to the class blog
• Kids liked it and said it was really hard!  That's good news.
• Didn't provide them instructions.  They had to use the instructions provided by the site.

Sara's trick is how to fit geotechnologies into the curriculum not forcing it into an already full curriculum as a separate item.

I am so pleased to have this opportunity to spend some time with communication directors from Minnesota.  We're listening to a telephone conference of national communication directors and how they are successfully utilizing technology to get the word out about their schools.  Following this information gathering, those in attendance here at TIES will be sharing a conversation about how they can apply these ideas as well.

Some items I've heard so far . . . 

• Podcasts
• Blogs
• Video Streams
• Electronic newsletters - more than a pdf of the paper newsletter, the current and timely information in a simple format that links back to the school web site for more detailed information
• Encourage responses back so you know not only what they are receiving but how they receive it. 
  
• Be sure to know what information they want not what information you think they want.
  
• Online surveys can help identify the "pulse" of the community.
• Cyber bulling is an issue both with adults in a school community - bashing the school electronically.  Sometimes it's best to deal with it calmly according to your communications plan.
• Email lists - maintaining them, keeping them current.
• 
  

November 21, 2007

KIC Group is meeting again in the Larpenteur room here at TIES. This is my first KIC meeting from the point of view as a TIES employee. Cool! It will be interesting to see if I look at things from a different point of view or am still in the same mode I was in while at Hamline and Hi-C. With only 3 weeks at TIES, probably more the old point of view than the new. We'll find out.

Doug Johnson from Mankato Schools presenting on Budgets
Zero-sum Budgets and Technology
Handout available

• Used to be that budgets were only a district issue but increasingly technology is a building issue as well.
• Zero Sum Game -
  
• There IS no more money. No matter how supportive your administrator is, the money has to cover more than technology and there just isn't more for what you want.
• If you get more money, someone else gets less!
• You really have to believe in your mission, what your program does for kids, and ask hard questions before requesting money for technology.
• However, it's morally reprehensible to let others spend money that we could spend better with technology.
• Funding sources and control
• Traditional Sources of Funds indicate that if you want to lobby for more, you're going to have the biggest impact at the state or local levels.
  
• State formula (60%)
• Local levy (35%)
• Federal dollars (5%)
• Bonds (special projects)
• General Funds v. Capital Funds
• Computer software can switch back and forth
• Who makes the funding decisions in your school and district? Different people have control in different districts.
• Other sources of funds that are often overlooked
• Block grant money - can be available for projects that need technology
• Principal's discretionary account - have a whole list of things you want in May at different price points in case there's money left that has to be spent! Anything from a digital camera to an interactive white board to a whole wireless lab.
• "Drug and violence" money - prevention is the goal here!
• Similar ideas would be school security funds, Q-Comp/Pro-pay, reading first,
  
• PTA gifts
• Fund raising
• Staff development funds
• Foundation aid
• Grants (Collaborative)
• Arbitrary budget - X number of dollars per student
• Outcome driven budget - based on a performance or function - every year you budget from a blank slate where you describe what you want to accomplish with those dollars and then outline how much it will cost.
• Three Budget parts
• Ongoing
• Maintenace
• Special projects
• New Resources: you have to adopt for a minimum of three years: first year to explore, second year to start integrating, and third year to make it a part of the curriculum. Don't drop things right away if they don't go well. Give them time.
• Maintenance is a big enough capital expense that they require maintenance - not fixing funds, but keep things at the status quo funds - computers, routers/switches, servers, AV equipment, software upgrades.
  
• Maintenance Formula: replacement cost x number items x cost of items = maintenance budget
• This has to be met every year forever - this will never be a one time cost - it is an annual cost
• Get on a replacement plan based on the life expectancy of the equipment so that replacement plan will vary by how long the equipment can be expected to last. Then replace it at that time using the maintenance budget
• 40 staff computers, last 5 years (1/5 = .20 = 20%) $1500 average cost (with prof dev and software licenses) 40 x .20 x $1,500 x = $12,000
• Then, remember that this old equipment is no longer supported other than to recycle it. Don't even try to keep it going because it will eat up your tech time and that has a cost too.
• How much does an $800 computer cost?
• Purchase Price - $800
  
• Upgrades - $200
  
• Peripherals - $300
• Software - $200
• Parts/upgrades over time - $200
• Support (1 tech/500) - $400 (figure for # of computers per tech doesn't include any server, network, web site, student information system, integration, skills support, teaching, etc.)
  
• Lan/Wan - $360
• On-line - $40
• TCO - $2,500
• Getting the most bang for your tech buck
• See Page 10 of the handout linked above
• Things like limiting life of computers, re-purposing, quotes/bids, group purchases, etc.
• Remember - "if we don't buy it - we don't support it - EVER" so if your people buy things without going throuhg you stand by this philosophy.
• 
  

We're gearing up for the conference here at TIES - or should I say THE CONFERENCE!  I'm learning so much about moderators, exhibit halls, scheduling workshops and sessions.  You can't imagine all the equipment that needs to be gathered and transported downtown.  It's exciting to experience all these preparations from the other side and realize all that goes into getting ready for an event like this.  In my mind I realized before that it would be a lot of work to pull off a conference of this size, but it wasn't until now that I realized just how much work by how many people!  I'll let you know as I get more involved, but for now my efforts are mainly being focused on blogging, wikis, and moderators.  So much to learn!