Facing the Elephant

Came across an excellent slideshare  Facing the Elephant (that is ICT) and Eating it One Bite @ a Time and it seemed really relevant after our ASTE presentation,  Breaking Through the Web (2.0) of Confusion! You can find our PPT slides there as well as the resources that we left for participants.

In truth, we must always remember, it isn’t the tools or the technology, but what we want to accomplish, the learning that we desire to take place, the Elephant Slideshare makes this point quite elegantly.

Maximizing Productivity

Sitka Harbor at night

While I’m a 100% advocate of working at a distance, I have to say that occasional face-to-face meetings really have a way of crystalizing the discussion and maximizing productivity.  This past week we met with content experts from around the globe and after months of working via audio/web conferencing our prior work really came together.  I wonder how much longer it would have taken had we not had this opportunity to meet together?  Something about eating lunch together, working and taking walk breaks, it’s all about the side conversations and personalities mixing together in ways that are difficult to reproduce online.  So, now I’m a 70% advocate for distance, and a 30% advocate for hybrid occasional real time, face-to-face meet-ups.  Very nice change of pace.  Glad we were able to pull it off.

Meanwhile, to catch up, we had a busy week at ASTE too.  You can find the presentation materials that Maureen and I gave at a presession entitled Breaking Through the Web (2.0) of Confusion at http://aste2009.pbwiki.com/ There are notes, resources, and our PPT on this website and it links to last year’s ASTE 08 presentation that Tina (UAA) and I gave.  So enjoy both resource pages.

Just a reminder too, for those asking, my Personal Learning Environment Map is updated and found at:  http://www.mindmeister.com/9002694 Had a few people ask about that again lately, so I thought I’d link it again.

The picture to the right (sadly only taken on a cell phone) has a caption created by bubblesnaps.com Kind of fun!  Check it out.

Professional Development Conference 2008

It was fun talking with many of you at the PDC 2008 today.  Give yourself time to look at my mind map (linked below) and remember, the arrows will take you to the actual websites.  Start slowly, trying just a little at a time.

Mind Map:  Your Personal Learning Environment

The leadership group looked at a different mindmap on Saturday.  That map had more distance education tools.  The interesting thing about distance education tools is that they are also great for face-to-face instructors.  In fact, I think DE, like gifted education, are umbrellas for regular teaching– in other words, if you excel as a gifted instructor or excel as a distance instructor, you are probably using teaching tools and strategies that are good for all children.  Anyway, the map for Saturday can be found here:

Mind Map:  Develop a Distance Education Class

Needing Strange Characters?

Are you always looking for ways to represent ¼ or © ?  Here’s the website for you then!  By using your “alt” key and the numeric keypad, you can create all kinds of good characters.  Thanks Amber for this great find!

Windows Alt Key Codes

TagCrowd- President-elect Obama’s Acceptance Speech

So I put in the speech and asked for top 50 words that appeared at least 3 times and here’s what I got.  The image is better visual (below) but you can see there’s some fun potential here to look at text in different ways.

america (26) american (26) better (8) bush (7) care (12) change (15) child (6) companies (5) country (16) democrats (9) economy (10) education (7) election (6) families (11) future (7) george (6) give (6) government (9) hard (6) health (6) help (6) iraq (6) jobs (10) john (16) keep (19) lives (11) love (6) mccain (20) measure (7) nation (7) party (6) pay (6) people (11) plan (7) politics (6) president (9) promise (32) responsibility (5) senator (6) talk (7) tax (6) think (5) together (7) tonight (8) washington (10) women (5) work (21) workers (7) years (10) young (8)

created at TagCrowd.com

Created by tagcrowd

More from WCET 08

Well, I didn’t do a great job keeping up on the conference, so here’s a recap of some of the sessions that particularly resonated with me.

First of all, some links that were of interest:

• Digital Scholarship Lab: This website will direct you to at least 2 great projects Voting America (which is now integrated with Google Maps) and History Engine which allows students to use primary documents to discover history. Great stuff here! They also have a terrific website: Valley of the Shadow which almost excites me about history. Definitely a great site to take a look at.
• TinyUrl This will take a long, long url and create a smaller url for you that is easier to give to people or send via email. Says it will not expire or break.
• WorldCat I haven’t explored, but this is a global library. I think you have to pay to be a part of this library, but then you’d be sharing online library resources with thousands of others.
• Tumblr Kind of like a blog on steroids. This looks like a very resource-rich blog site. They say it is more like a scrapbook than “just” a blog.
• Informal Learning This is a very nice module on Informal Learning with great links if you have the time to work through it. There are more modules to browse at: MET Course Weblog
• The 2008 Horizon Report Haven’t had a chance to read the entire report, but it looks like a terrific resource which explains a lot of the newest technologies and talks about adoption times etc. Excellent reference for all educators.
• Pageflakes A very easy portal or homepage where you can add news, RSS feeds, images, weather, very similar to iGoogle pages, very friendly interface. Another similar website is Netvibes, but I think I like Pageflakes better.
• Sharepoint Server At least 2 universities mentioned using Microsoft’s Sharepoint to monitor projects and set deadlines and tasks online. Not sure how different it is from BaseCamp (another project management tool) but it is definitely worth looking into. If you are using this product, please let us know what you think! Overkill if you are sharing projects between only 4-5 people?

In general, WCET again did not disappoint. The networking was great, the sessions mostly good and there’s a lot to follow up and learn about.

Personal Learning Environments

Pre-conference on PLEs WCET 2008

I’m at WCET and just completed the first session on PLEs. What are PLEs? Why do we care about this? In truth, Personal Learning Environments are really not ‘personal’ at all,in the sense that they involve all the co-workers, friends and resources that we gather to enhance our learning experience. However, they are “personal” since each of us gathers the technologies that help us do our jobs, gather our research and share information with others.

Collecting, sharing, analyzing, building by action– PLE is a verb, not a noun. PLE is really about who we are. The facilitators challenged the group by asking how teachers can presume to ‘teach’ if they themselves don’t have experience with the technologies that are now being used to share and connect people with similar interests, jobs, etc. They felt that our web presences also people know who we are–what does it mean not to have any web presence? What happens when I look for you on the web and there’s nothing there? Identity is now linked to the web.

This was a very rich session. The facilitators have provided their resources and links and activities at edtechpost

Some of the tools that were showcased and definitely worth further investigation included:

• Diigo- like delicious but with other features that might make drafting and publishing to a blog easier. Social bookmarking allows you to save your bookmarks on someone else’s server. Save your identiy and access your bookmarks. No longer trapped on a single computer. Share with other people. Tagging, keywords. Descriptive information is provided by *you* or by others. Can be corrupt. Scribe and annotate. Create groups and lists for your bookmarks. Add link to your blog. Share bookmarks.
• File Url and Dropbox — tools for sharing large files with others; free tools
• Pipes and Feed2js– Okay, this is pretty cool. Take a number of blogs and create an RSS feed that consolidates them together. This could have particular use for a team or group that maintain separate blogs, but you can read them all together.
• Scraping– was really interesting. Gathering data on the web and scraping it off a website into googlespreadsheet so that it can be repurposed and relinked. Great way to gather information from multiple locations which is dynamic and not have to keep updating it. Can’t say that I’d ever even thought about this before.
• Google Coop, Lijit– Creating your own social networks, bookmarks, websites and make them searchable. You can gather pertinent links and search the content, rather like creating your own mini-google collections.
• Wow, and plugins too were mentioned. No point in re-creating their great resource page here.

Kind of silly for me to not take advantage of their resources and be relinking here on my page– so I won’t do that, again check their resource website listed above. Suffice it to say that this was a stimulating session, their resources are excellent and I think Scott Leslie, Chris Lott and Jared Stein for a very worthwhile day.

Phew- Was it just the pre-session today??

Change in the air

Not just the weather turning colder, but change is definitely in the air today.  A new product put out by Google is going to be released today.  This is a new web-browser called Chrome.

You can read more about it at ARS Technica.  It will need to be tested by Bb and Moodle users, but might become strong competition for Firefox and Mozilla and IE Explorer.  Anyone tested it and have favorable results– please share!

Link to things we found of interest at the conference

I thought that the best way to share the conference was to use some of the collaborative tools that we learned about at the conference.

I began with mindomo.com but soon found that for collaboration, this wasn’t the best tool.  Here’s what happened.  I created a mind map and shared it with 2 others to collaborate.  They opened the map in the morning, kept it open all day doing other things.  Meanwhile, I was working away filling it up.  I saved my map.  They, at the day’s end added a few things to their open map, which had never updated automatically and saved the morning map with only a few things OVER my afternoon efforts.  In other words, not having auto save features, OR a feature which would have let them know that I was working, they erased my data.  Features that need to be added for sure!

So, attempt two we switched to Mindmeister.  You can find this new mind map at:  Distance Learning Conference: What We Learned. 

More about Teaching and Learning Conference

Okay, back at home and time to process all the things we were exposed to at Madison. Usually it takes a bit of time for things to sift out, the speakers and ideas that ‘stick’ to the top layer of your mind versus the less useful, less dynamic things that have sunk to the bottom reaches.

I’m going to try to organize my thoughts using one of the new mind/concept mapping tools that we saw-I’ll invite Maureen and Marissa (who also attended this conference from UA) to join this site and add their thoughts and links collected from Madison.

More soon (and that address) when it’s complete. Meanwhile, feel free to check out the polling feature of Zoho Polls.