NECC ’09: Quest Atlantis

Wandered into this session with teachpaperless (Shelly Blake-Plock) and I’m listening in on a conference call from Australia about the kids’ virtual world Quest Atlantis.

It sounds like this program is World of Warcraft wedded to Second Life related to Microsoft Word and Kindle… by which I mean that it’s a place to present and review and edit your writing within the context of a 3-d virtual world.

They’re saying the kids are between 8 and 14, and safety is paramount. There are profanity filters on the automated side, and chat logs are also monitored by live observers.  So there is moderation of negative or phobic or bullying behavior, but also praise of positive behaviors and acts of virtue and quality.

In other words, it’s a utopia.  Or a dystopia, I’m not sure which.  Kids become enforcers of the norms after time.  The teachers in the room seem to think this is utterly cool and wonderful.

I come at this from a very different perspective.  More than a third of my students are connected to me through facebook, which I treat as a professional site as much as I can.  They monitor what I do as much as I monitor what they do. I understand that sometimes their norms do not match mine, and they recognize that I am (when it comes to Facebook) an unreasonable and probably prudish dweeb.

But my friend John in college said once, AOL isn’t bad.  It’s sort of like being virtually in the Jacob K. Javits convention center.  All sorts of people are telling you, come look at this, watch this, look at our product, see our stuff.” And the whole time, they’re distracting you from the signs that say EXIT. “you don’t want to see anything out there,” they say. But outside those doors is New York City, and I live there.

By which he meant, that we should be cautious of sticking kids into paradises, or walled gardens.  THis program may be great, and this virtual world may be wonderful. But why must we build ‘fake’ environments for kids to practice in, instead of giving them adult tools, and teaching them ab initio to be cautious about strangers, behave appropriately, and produce work worthy of your name?

On the Other Hand, they did have some kids making gains of 2 years in reading ability in only six months. So that’s a good thing, and maybe it does speak to a kid’s need to have a walled garden.

NECC ’09: Introduction to Scratch

Michael Resnick and Karen Brennan of the MIT Media Lab are presenting. That’s good thing #1.  I expect this is going to be a solid presentation.

Good thing #2… I downloaded Scratch in about 11 seconds. I’d downloaded it to a different machine, and forgot it wasn’t one this one.  Lo and behold, I thought I was sunk.  Instead, I got it right away.  Two for two is good.

Team: Karen Brennan, Evelyn Eastmond, jon Maloney, Amon Millner, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Mitchel Resnick, Eric Rosenbaum, Natalie Rusk, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, and the MIT Media Lab.

1500 new projects added every day, more than 2 million projects in the last two years.  Showing a narrated project of the structure of the Earth’s crust, a game where you work through the economics of Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

European geography game… code borrowed and turned into US Geography game!

Hard to make a full-scale Scratch project in an hour… but we’ll make an interactive post-card.

FINAL THOUGHT: I really think this is the best educational session I’ve attended all conference.

NECC ’09: Realtime Podcasting

This looked like it was going to be a great session. But it was definitely geared toward those who teach with PCs rather than Macs, people who’d never podcasted before.  I’m a Mac user with an existing podcast, so I gave up my seat to someone else.

A couple of quick ideas that I left with, though:

1. Have a clear idea who your audience is or will be. The audience may grow, but have an initial audience in mind.
2. Use a script.
3. Keep a record of what you’ve covered in each episode, and have an overall plan for your episodes.  Know when the series will stop, when it will be over.
4. Include multiple voices.  One single voice of authority doesn’t always work.
5. Keep track of the jingles, sound effects, images, and links you’ve included. Try to to repeat anything too frequently.
6. Plan, Produce, Publish, Promote
7. Involve kids as voice actors, script writers, researchers for a series.

NECC ’09: Powerboosting your lessons with Wikis

Presenters: Cheri Toldedo, Walden U. (IL), Rose Arnell, MaryFriend Shepard Description: Power up your lessons by exploring Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, graphics, videos, podcasts, and other engaging technologies. Come with a lesson in mind to adapt for use with a wiki.
Twitter Tag: #powiki
Website: powerboostnecc09.wikispaces.com

Wikis for collaborative projects.  WE believe web2.0 tools should be used by students, and they should be massaging the tools. Knowledge construction is what it’s all about. We want the students to be active creators, interactors, webbers of information.

Collaboration is more than one kid doing A, one doing B, one doing C, mashing it together, and turning it it.  There must also be Kid A editing and considering B & C, etc.

All kinds of web 2.0 tools can be integrated into a wiki: polls, graphs, tables, cells, graphs, images, audio, video.

1. teach kids to set up a wiki, teach kids to revert pages, teach them to understand pages, discussion, user pages and histories.

2. The advantage of having users required to sign in to a wiki, is that students, colleagues, faculty, parents will have to use names in tools.

3. The history pages in wikis, and contributor lists is the beauty of the program… you have the ability to view who is doing work and who is not.  Who is contributing and making quality contributions?

4. CommonCraft’s video on how to use Wikis is almost better than this presentation.  But It’s a brief connection to tech.

5. How to upload images and files.  Wikispaces.com has widget tools, which allows you to embed YouTube videos, and other materials directly to the site.  You can also embed podcasts from Audacity and other sites.

6. Possible to embed a calendar from Google Calendar into a Wiki.  So you could post deadlines for major projects into a wiki, as well.

7. All kinds of embedding tools.

I AM nearly completely shut out of Twitter, my own wiki, my blog, and the rest of the internet. Is the rest of NECC ’09 so thoroughly shut out of the Net?

NECC ’09: Library of Congress Session

In case it’s not obvious, my regular patterns are somewhat disrupted this week, because I’m at NECC (the National Educators Computing Conference).  At the moment, I’m in Room 151A of the Walter E Washington Convention Center with something like 100 other people waiting for a presentation on the Library of Congress.

1. Presenter needed to download RealPlayer night before, but waited until session was almost ready to begin.

2. Issues with Library of Congress website – hard to find materials, hard to find materials again.

3. explanation of how to find an image in Library of Congress: image of Sojourner Truth… “I sell the shadow to support the substance”.  Presenters suggest terms like “african american history” “photograph” “sojourner truth” and “slavery”.  She explains that there are no such subjects or tags attached to this particular image!

4. Learning to find content on Library of Congress website. Go to main website. 
http://www.loc.gov/
Go to topics:
http://www.loc.gov/topics/

4a. American history section is organized by both time period or thematic issues.  BUT I NOTE, there’s no ability to tag or create folksonomies on the LOC website.  There’s no way to expand the search process.

4b. separate page for
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/
The old “learning” page has been replaced with this new page.  Separate topics under classroom materials like baseball.

5. Each thematic collection has a related list of search terms.  So if you’re looking for baseball items, you can go to a list of search terms used to categorize all baseball memorabilia.

6. Searching “service station” reveals 641 items.  But searching “filling station” results in 995 items. Searching “franklin Roosevelt” pulls up 332 items, many of them connected with photographs of mountains..  But searching for “franklin d roosevelt” results in 253 DIFFERENT items, many of them of the president.  Searching “roosevelt, franklin” results in many, many more.  MUST search many different keywords to find many things.

7. This is particularly important! Any URL of a specific item in the collection that originally pops up is a temporary URL ID that lasts about a half-hour.  Use the instructions here on finding a permanent URL.

8. Most maps in the collection are highly scaleable.  You can download complete maps, or details of those maps. They’re scanned at very high resolution, so you can see them very closely. (Hope I made this link right).

9. The Library of Congress is also the home of the Copyright Office, so you have to be VERY careful about following their copyright guidelines, and acknowledging which materials are public domain, and which items are not.

10. Each general department of the Library has a reading room. (here’s the link to the Prints and Photos reading room).  Most such reading rooms have a researchers’ toolbox, with tools, tips and tricks for teaching people how to make use of that particular collection. (here’s the researchers’ toolbox for Prints & Photos). From 2-4pm you can also do synchronous chat through the website on weekdays! wow.

11. the WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY.  I saw this yesterday and was absolutely AWED. It’s a partnership with libraries all over the globe to put rare and unusual materials online, organized by continent, time period, theme, and item type.  Everything from Napoleon’s science staff’s Description of Egypt to Sumerian business documents to maps of South America.  Cool.

12. Summer institutes and visitor programs available for teachers.

13. TPSDirect.  Teaching with Primary Sources.  Teachers can build a collection of primary sources for themselves and their students for regular use and reuse.

IN OTHER WORDS, you need to be trained by a Library of Congress employee in order to find materials… which means sticking around the site for long periods of time.  The training is not particularly hard, but you do need to understand patience and attention to detail.  Exactly like Gladwell’s point about mathematics last night.

NECC ’09: ISTE President

“help us carry out our policy agenda on Capitol Hill.”

This was one of the messages, although not as baldly phrased, from the ISTE president yesterday.  There was a definite note of triumphalism in the speech last night, amounting to the idea that we have a president and a congress who can be bullied/persuaded/convinced to buy into the educational technology program, and we can get everything we want and need for our vendors.

It’s important to remember that any organization as large as this one winds up becoming a lobbying group on Capitol Hill. There are allegedly 18,000 people present at NECC this year, and ISTE is probably 2-3 times that size.  So it’s no wonder that they want to engage in a little bit of lobbying while they’re here.

But please remember, when you go home, that this means we are now part of one of the many “special interests” that influence Congress.  And try not to rail against us too much when the folks on Fox News or the pundits on CNN or CNBC get on our case.  We have met the enemy and he is us.