Home Posts tagged "community" (Page 2)
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Responsible for your learning time…

Published on May 7, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
Carnegie playground 5th Ave. N.Y.C. (LOC)
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

I had a meeting today that brought together a lot of different people who are all involved in making sure that the adults in our school district are supporting the kids in our school district (via PD and resource gathering). The most interesting parts of this meeting will not be the topic of my blog post today, but rather the very short discussion about making sure that we are all responsible for our work time as a part of this new group of individuals.

Many types of employees have their time tracked for them, whether by logging in to a time tracking system or by simply showing up every day to a site and being in front of kids. But, it is those outliers, like myself, who go through this very strange (at least to me) process of tracking their own time.

(I currently track my time using a simple program called “Time Tracker”, which you can find here: http://code.google.com/p/time-tracker-mac/. It allows me to simply click the play button when I am “on the clock” and the stop button when I am not.)

While this may sound like a very uninteresting turn for this blog to take, the reason why I bring it up here is because I wonder if this isn’t exactly what we want our students to be doing.

I hear so many educators talk about finding a different way tie students to learning environments other than seat time (Or so-called Carnegie Units), but I hear very few advocating for the students to actually take control of that connection. If a student were to actually keep track of their own time, we could actually have the conversation about what it means to have meaningful learning “time”. If they could only press the play button when they are truly engaged, then we could actually track what is makes learning happen for students. Is this the kind of “responsibility for learning” that we would want?

What I need, though, is a way for students to track the time that they have spent learning on their cell phones. I want them to be able to press the play button while they are out at a museum or at a rock concert or in a park. I want them to be able to jot notes about what they are learning and have that all stored for themselves and for their teachers in a search-able site, where we could apply some analytics. I want to be able to see learning styles measured by this “universal play button”. I want all learning to be connected in this way, where students see the concrete connection between authentic learning and the ability to be honored for that learning (by progressing through school, graduation, etc.).

I guess the question for today is this:

How do you track your learning time, and would it work for students to do the same?

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I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

Published on May 3, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
 
The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
 
So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
 
For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
 
Shouldn’t it always be this way?
 
(As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
 
Sent from my iPod

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The Missing Community for Google Apps?

Published on February 28, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
Image representing Google App Engine as depict...
Image via CrunchBase

As I am working hard to roll out Google Apps for Education for our online school, I am struggling to find the community that supports it. With all of the great things that Google Apps has to offer, it is mind boggling that there wouldn’t be a single community spaces (or even a series of well-developed communities) that would be talking about best practices for collaborative document creation or the easiest ways to communicate with students using global contact lists.

Does this place exist?

Well, this is what I have found so far:

But, these sites are not enough to me. I want a conversation about student learning with Google Apps. And the way that it will start is by stating in one place just who is using Google Apps for Education and how to contact them to ask questions. One of my favorite bloggers, presenters, and teachers (Lucy Gray) has taken us in that direction quite a bit by offering a Google Form to identify yourself.

Please go and add yourself!

And, here are the results (some ussual suspects, but many potential collaborators that I have never made contact with).

The next step in this process of creating community around the topic is to tag every blog post, presentation, and wiki edit, tweet and video with “GoogleAppsEd” or #GoogleAppsEd.

I want to see us start tagging ourselves as GAE users, not because we love Google or because we believe that they are best thing to happen to education since the invention of erasers. I believe that the conversation is important because if we would like students to collaborate using these tools, we must be using them to collaborate.

The last step, that I would like to figure out is setting up a series of online meetups to talk about the issues inherent in rolling out Google Apps for Eduction. Here are the ones I would start with, but please add ones that you woud like to discuss in the comments:

  1. The legality of giving students e-mail adresses as young as Kindergarten.
  2. Using Google Apps as a wharehouse for our data.
  3. The Google Terms of Use
  4. Advanced uses of Docs (forms, turning things in via sharing, etc.)
  5. Advanced uses of gmail (academic uses of chat, system-wide groups, etc.)
  6. Advanced uses of calendar (student and faculty calendars meshing)
  7. Labs for google apps including Moderator.

I think that there is a lot more here, but I just want to start the conversation. Please spread the link to Lucy Gray’s spreadsheet and form and the tag for spreading the conversation. Let’s talk soon.

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Almost the same.

Published on February 16, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
Drupal
Image via Wikipedia

Whenever I see somone talk about their brand new LMS, CMS, or collaborative learning product, I tend to be very skeptical. No matter how good it is or how open the architecture is, if it doesn’t have the community built around it, it isn’t worth it. Drupal isn’t powerful because it has so much flexibility to expand into any organization, it is powerful because of the community that supports every single module that is created. Google docs isn’t powerful because of how much collaboration can happen when you share a document, it is powerful because of all of the people at Google and around the world that are using the product and thinking of new uses for it.

I don’t need to see a demo or know how well integrated with our other systems it is. I just want to know who will be there when it breaks. I want to see the wiki where I can add to the learning that I am a part of. I want to know the people in the forum. I want to believe that the learning product I am using will be there tomorrow, not because of how well the company is selling it, but because the community invests enough in it to make sure that it grows and becomes better each day.

So, while I will check out this “open source product”, I am not going to hold my breath because I don’t know the community, because my network hasn’t mentioned it (although, other networks have apparently). No product is worth a lack of community (even blackboard has a community around it, even if it does seem to be self-loathing). So, while I will be open to using something less than community-driven  if I have to, I will say to you, it is only almost the same as a well supported open resource, almost.

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The educon 2.1 opening panel.

Published on January 24, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

Idea one: The purpose of school is not to churn out a finished product. Innovation doesn’t come from a place of completion.
 
Idea two: If we mean 99 percent of the places that we call school, I would say there is no purpose.
 
The purpose should be to be THE place to go and create, learn, and build real things.
 
Idea three: The purpose changes. Does the purpose take into consideration of all cultures and ideas. It can’t just be the transmission of values, other than inquiry.
 
Idea four: The purpose of school is to create community.
 
The best thing you might be able to do in a day is getting the students to talk to one another.
 
Idea five: The purpose of school is to learn how to communicate.
 
You have to be able to present arguments and convince people that you know what you are talking about.
 
Calibrate what students know as important, difficult, and original.
 
Idea six: The purpose of school is to expose kids to people who are actually doing what is possible.
 
Perhaps it is in finding out how things really work. Perhaps it is in not knowing everything. Perhaps it is in knowing exactly what you want to do with your life.
 
Idea seven: The purpose of school is to be the great equalizer. But the system can’t keep up.
 
We need to fix it so that schools are what they should be.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Networks are cities.

Published on January 23, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

I am on my way to educon 2.1 right now, looking out into the night (don’t worry, I am using my phone in airplane mode). For some reason there are no clouds out there tonight, and all I can see are the bright lights of cities, clustered together and beautiful. What I am thinking about as my mind is still trying to wrap itself around the conversation I will be leading on saturday, is that the lights of a city look like the networks that I dream about.
 
I want networks that are far reaching and bright. I want to be able envision the whole thing all at once or focus on a single connection. I want to hop from network to network. I want to see far off into the horizon and know that there are other networks thinking about the same things I am.
 
I want the network to be on every time I look, glowing more radiantly in the node that need my attention right now. I want knowledge to run around my network like the people push on out toward their well ordered lofts in the city and winding single-family house lined roads in the suburbs. I want my network to bring me in for a landing every once in a while, grounding me in what is really so important: taking the time to get to know an individual and seeing them as more valuable than any amount of community created or knowledge gained.
 
(I know this post is pretty flowery, but I am away from my family for the first time since my son was born. I may be a little wistful on the blog for the next few days.)
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Networks are cities.

Published on January 23, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

I am on my way to educon 2.1 right now, looking out into the night (don’t worry, I am using my phone in airplane mode). For some reason there are no clouds out there tonight, and all I can see are the bright lights of cities, clustered together and beautiful. What I am thinking about as my mind is still trying to wrap itself around the conversation I will be leading on saturday, is that the lights of a city look like the networks that I dream about.
 
I want networks that are far reaching and bright. I want to be able envision the whole thing all at once or focus on a single connection. I want to hop from network to network. I want to see far off into the horizon and know that there are other networks thinking about the same things I am.
 
I want the network to be on every time I look, glowing more radiantly in the node that need my attention right now. I want knowledge to run around my network like the people push on out toward their well ordered lofts in the city and winding single-family house lined roads in the suburbs. I want my network to bring me in for a landing every once in a while, grounding me in what is really so important: taking the time to get to know an individual and seeing them as more valuable than any amount of community created or knowledge gained.
 
(I know this post is pretty flowery, but I am away from my family for the first time since my son was born. I may be a little wistful on the blog for the next few days.)
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

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Until it becomes easy for everyone…

Published on January 11, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

I keep on thinking that because I am learning more and more how to get the most out of my phone, my browser, my email, and my time that others must be doing the same.
 
I mean, how could you not always be on the lookout for ways to do things faster, better, or more efficiently? That is like saying (to me), how could you not be placing yourself on a trajectory of ambition and success?
 
Well, the more that I see those commercials for sprint with the CEO talking down to a majority of americans, insulting them into buying better cell phones, the more I begin to understand that many people are looking to get by on what they have. They may be hopeful that something better is going to come along, but don’t know how or where to get it.
 
I guess what I am saying is that until it is easy for people to find the kind of learning that I seek out every day, it will not become a part of many lives. I can already hear many folks saying that learning is messy or that it is hard, and that it should be both of those things. I think that both of those things remain true, but that accessing the hard and messy learning should not be difficult.
 
If the “House Search of 2009″ is any indication, it is incredibly difficult to find out information about neighborhoods or schools that isn’t biased or based upon arcane measures of success. This kind of learning should be at everyone’s fingertips. We should be able to made learning decisions by turning on a dime if we need to change direction.
 
But we can’t. We have to wait and see, on nearly all learning that isn’t fully connected and informed.
 
Well, I don’t want to wait and see. I want overwhelming support of a network that is informing my every decision. I want it for everyone else too.
 
Until that is the norm, I don’t think that we are going to find much change happening within a school, a community, or a cell phone plan.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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A list of tags…

Published on January 5, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

The EdTechTalk delicious site has a wealth of relevent tags. It has so many in fact, that it may be THE resource for tags about Educational Technology and learning in general. I love being able to select different tags and find out what other people are categorizing within this rather large community. However, what if you wanted to use those tags somewhere else? What if you wanted to add those tags to the choices in your own blog or search according to those terms?

What if you wanted to categorize all of your ideas according to what the community has deemed worthy of their time? Well, I did want to do that. I wanted to use the common tags of our community, so I have made all of the tags in EdTechTalk (at least up until today) into a comma separated file for easy import into anything I would like to use them for.

Here is the file: edtechtalk-tags

Pedagogical implication: I think that it really makes sense for us to start using the same words to talk about learning. Coming together on a group of tags that we would like to use for aggregation purposes is something that we have neglected too long. The community is far enough along to put get into a discussion about just where we want our folksonomies to go. We need to take ownership of terms like elearning and make them more specific. We also should be teaching our students to come together on terms to use so that all of their work can not only be found later, but also grouped according to topic, theme, or even skill level.

Think about if we had a way to group student work according to a self-reflected score (of effort, of achievement, etc.). What if we could use exemplars and organize them according to the tags that they have self-selected.

Where else should we go with our community of tags?

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CAGT 2008: Technology and Community

Published on October 10, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

Presentation (both live and PowerPoint):

Technology And Community

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Cell Phone Back Channel and Idea Network:

Audio Reflections:

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Topics and Links from the presentation:

  1. Make the Community Visible
  2. Make the Community Inclusive
  3. Make the Community Public
  4. Make the Community Always-On
  5. Make the Community Lasting
  6. Tending your community
© Learning is Change