NECC ’09: Data Analysis

Over the last few days, I’ve watched a gratifyingly large spike build on my Blog Stats page.  Since I switched from LiveJournal to WordPRess, I’ve usually received no more than 10 visitors to my blog on any given day.  During NECC 2009, though, that numbers welled upwards to over two hundred a day.

Cool, I thought.  I have new readers! But sadly, it doesn’t always work that way.  WordPress’s statistics tools show me that most of my posts are being read by one-time visitors.  The people who have subscribed using the RSS feed feature, while loyal, are still minimal.

How many of them are there?  Probably nine.  I’ve checked about a dozen of my most popular blog entries, and  I can easily see that the total number of visitors to any given entry varies widely when I look at one-off visits.

But the number of subscriber visits always equals nine.  Sometimes they all visit on the same day; at other times they visit spread out over two or three days. But there are always nine visitors from RSS feeds, and that suggests that I have nine readers loyal enough to sign up for RSS.

So who are you? And what are you nterested in me writing about?  And for anyone else out there, why AREN’t you subscribing? Let me know.

NECC 2009 visualized

Update: Someone asked me why this photo was so small, and how they could read the various items in the mind map.  I said, “just download it and then zoom in!” thinking that would solve the problem.  Wrong! So I’ve now linked it to the original on my Flickr account.  Original post continues below.

MindMap of NECC '09

At right is my visualization of my NECC experience in 2009.  It’s a tag cloud or mind map, lightly linked by lines radiating out from the center.  I generated it on the train ride home on my iPhone, using the program SimpleMindX.

Wednesday evening I stopped at my parents’ house on my way back to home and school. There’s no internet connection there for my own laptop; I have to go through the rather cumbersome process of borrowing my mother’s computer and logging in to websites and tools to us the Net there, and of course she’s a heavy computer user so this means stealing her time.

Yesterday, Thursday, I drove home, stopping along the way for a chapel service at the Boy Scouts camp where I usually work in the summer.  (Some of you may criticize me for working for an organization you perceive as sexist, racist, homophobic, etc, and all I can tell you is it’s not like that, really. REALLY. You’ll have to trust me or not on this one).

All of the principles and guidelines I heard at NECC 2009 about meaningful learnng — that there should be opportunities for failure; that there should be teamwork, creativity, and interconnected learning, with project-based curriculums and connectivity between disciplines and across social networks — already exist in Scouting programs across the US.  In a sense, it’s this alternate social framework for schools that’s been doing learning 2.0 actvities without learning 2.0 tools.

Don’t get me wrong.  The BSA has some growing and transforming to do.  But a loyal and dedicated cadre of scouts and former scouts will teach 350-500 students a week for six weeks this summer, just at this one camp.  The kids will leave with 6-10 merit badges under their belts: in swimming and boating, first aid and citizenship, environmental science, crafts, shooting a rifle, archery and more.  Kids and staff together are motivated to help each other learn and grow.   The scouts span a range of mental and physical abilities, but everyone gets stronger along the way.  There are requirements (set to high standards), but no formal tests.

And that seems to be what we expect of our schools: high standards, deep reflection, rich connectivity, meaningful learning, goal-oriented, and turning out successful students eager and willing to learn more.

I keep wondering: how do we make schools more like Scouting?    I have a few answers, but we all have a long way to go.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready for a family reunion this weekend, and an interview today.  I seem to have picked up a sleeplessness while in DC, too, because I’ve been so wired since NECC that I’ve not slept more than three hours a night since Tuesday.  Yow.

NECC ’09: Twitter and its discontents?

I thought NECC was a twitterfest, as did the folks at Think Like a Teacher, until one of my PLN friends showed me how to use the Twitter search API to count the number of posts that used the #necc and #necc09 hashtags. Counting the responses even after the conference ended, there were about 200 users of Twitter and about 1500 tagged messages. I posted over a hundred, and I believe you and a few others posted a lot as well, which means that a lot of users posted only one or two.

Of course, there may have been a lot that went untagged; I know I posted at least as many untagged messages as tagged during the conference, because I went from about 800 tweets to 1200 over the course of Sunday to Thursday. Even so, the statistical evidence suggests that the Twitterers weren’t as much of an influence as we thought we were.

With over 18,000 attendees, 1500 messages (only 1,300 if you count only messages logged on the official days of the conference) isn’t that many.  Given that only 200 users generated those comments, and that perhaps 20 users generated 80% of them, it suggests that Twitter has a long way to go.

On the other hand, I encountered a young man in the halls, and he said that Educators were the only people who knew how to use Twitter ‘correctly’.  He didn’t really explain what he meant by that, but it was clear that he was impressed by the way that we logged sessions and conferences, and talked to one another constantly. This may be one of the turning points for this technology, where we demonstrate a new communication medium — talking loudly in a conference hall while giving the speakers and panelists our complete attention.

NECC ’09: We need new language

I’m in the Bloggers’ Café at NECC 2009, and listening to the ISTEvision tv show in the background.  I’m amazed at the language.

No, people aren’t swearing.  But they’re using the language of motion. “We have to move into the future.”  “We have to change direction and speed into the changing world.” “We’re moving forward at incredible speed.” “We’re stepping into the future, not a step back in time.” – (ISTE CEO for the last one).

I’m guilty of this myself.  But it’s the wrong language.

First of all, we’re always “moving” through the dimension of time, as Einstein demonstrated with his famous temporal arrows diagrams, and as the theory of relativity further proved.  Second, that arrow pushes us in only one direction, out of what was and into what will be.

An earlier commenter pointed out that “change” is also a loaded term. It’s what you get when you buy a cup of coffee.  It’s what you put into the cup or hand of a beggar.  A Buddhist monk, in the old joke, would tell you that it comes from within, not from without.

Again… it’s the wrong language.

The School 2.0 BYOL session yesterday talked about how important it is when talking about school 2.0, and educational and learning reform, to engage in specific concrete thinking and action.  Maybe we should shift our language choices to other forms, away from language connected with change and motion, and toward specific,  concrete actions… hence:

• I will USE digital tools in the classroom.
• I will DESIGN lessons around student action
• I will SHUT UP and let students talk.
• I will STOP USING paper worksheets in class
• I will GRADE using frequent student input
• I will PAINT, SCULPT, and WRITE. to model for my students
• I will WORK ONLINE and STOP FEARING the Internet
• I will TALK WITH PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.
• I will VOTE for progressive education with my vote, my money and my feet.
• I will DANCE with ambiguity and music.
• I will PLAY online games and CONNECT with my students and my teachers with social media.

Feel free to add to the list, but I think that this kind of language is a whole not more valuable than “moving into the future.”

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.