SpeedGeek Learning Version .1

Published on November 9, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

I am pleased to announce the following features within the first prototype at http://speedgeeklearning.com:

57 Videos of Ignite Presentations from around the United States (Boulder, NYC, San Fransisco, Columbus, and many others)

8 Different Sessions answering attempting to answer the following questions:

A single flash user interface for interacting with all videos (A carousel of content)
A hide and unhide collaborative document (Etherpad) on each session that allows for you to contact the individual presenters about their projects and give your own answer to the question on the session.
A chat interface for each session that allows for real-time conversation about any single video or the entire collection
The ability to share SpeedGeek Learning via e-mail, twitter, facebook and all of the other services that come along with “Share This”

I would love it if you would test out all of them and see what there is to see. I would also love any feedback that you can provide this prototype, either by simply e-mailing it to me or by leaving comments on the Planning site (if you don’t have access to that yet, let me know).

The other two things you can do to help the project at this point are as follows:

Think of any way that you could use the SpeedGeek Learning platform within your own work. If there are any videos that you use and would like to collaborate upon, let’s set you up with an instance of your own. If there are certain big questions you would like to answer, let’s answer them with video and collaborative documents. Start to think about pushing the platform to be what you would like it to be. I am up any ideas you have. Just let me know.

Spread the word that the prototype is available. I would love to get as many people answering these questions in the collaborative document and passing the link around as possible. If you feel the need to blog about it, do so. If you feel the urge to tweet, please do so. I pushed out the initial idea, but this is the first version that I can actually show off.

Thank you so much for your continued interest. I can’t wait to get to phase two, which will include:

Recording your own videos within the interface.
Analytics about individual video views
Greater collaboration with the presenters of the sessions
More ways to organize the sessions
Further design work to flesh out the platform

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Staying away

Published on July 2, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

This is the first time in a few years that I did not attend NECC
virtually. I have never attended physically, but I have anticipated
all of the thinking and writing that happens during this conference.
This year, however, I am on vacation. I have not taken a vacation from
thinking or pushing myself in all things ed tech. Rather, a vacation
from the competition for attention. A vacation from large halls with
standing room only (for even virtual attendees). A vacation from
second-hand commentary standing for research.

Really though, this vacation isn’t about escaping NECC. It is about
sleeping on a hammock with my daughter and waiting for the warm Austin
wind to take us away from everything that plugs in.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

2 Comments.

LiC Podcast: Design with Forever in Mind Archive

Published on June 26, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Professional Development, Uncategorized.

Although I was thrown a whole bunch by not having wifi for the first 45 minutes, I think that the session was worthwhile. Here is the archive of all that we have done. I am also including my planning podcast from my drive up to copper mountain.

Presentation:

Drop Box:

drop.io: simple private sharing

Important Links:

Ben Wilkoff Links:

Learning is Change Blog and Podcast>
Twitter Page
Other Presentation on Thursday (The On Button: Instant and Always-on Collaboration)

Presentation Links:

Exit Plan for Vocaroo:

Wav files backed up to a hard drive/server

Exit Plan for Drop.io:

Everyone who downloads the podcast will have a copy.

Exit Plan for JamGlue:

Mp3 files of mixes

Exit Plan for Screencastle:

Download Direct Link to File and store on hard drive/server

Exit Plan for Screentoaster:

Mov Downloads before uploading to screencastle site

Exit Plan for DimDim:

Download and build own DimDim server and store recordings there.

Exit Plan for Twitter:

Backup twitter with Tweettake

Exit Plan for Google Docs:

Google Docs Download GreaseMonkey Script

Ustream Archive:

Twitter Archive:

CosmoCat: @bhwilkoff was great to learn about screencasting and audio recording! Hope you enjoy Audioboo! #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:46 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Thanks to everyone for adding value to my session #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:40 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: http://twitterforteachers.wetpaint.com/ #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:13 PM GMT ·
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toniobarton: Learning needs real purpose and real audience. #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:08 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: How do you capture learning? Add to the spreadsheet: http://tr.im/pvz2 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 09:05 PM GMT ·
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villagegreen: #forevertie09 http://screencastle.com/watch/b0c8a1b0ac6aa37d179f945721ee4400

Jun 23, 2009 08:40 PM GMT ·
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CosmoCat: I’m searching for #forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/4A1lo3 (expand)

Jun 23, 2009 08:19 PM GMT ·
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care507: I’m searching for #forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/4A1lo3 (expand)

Jun 23, 2009 08:13 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: I’m searching for forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/MVxM0 (expand)
#forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:13 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: #forevertie09 Devonee – Technology Integration Specialist from Mesa County

Jun 23, 2009 08:12 PM GMT ·
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forevertie09: I’m searching for #forevertie09 live on TweetGrid Search – http://bit.ly/4A1lo3 (expand)

Jun 23, 2009 08:11 PM GMT ·
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villagegreen: #forevertie09 to back channel: I’m Matthew Woolums, Integration Coordinator from DPS. My blog: http://villagegreen.edublogs.org

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: SpEd in middle school in NW Denver. #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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jcope50: #forevertie09 Hi! Jill – Skyline HS Teacher Librarian- St. Vrain – just moved to CO on Saturday from CA!!!

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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toniobarton: #forevertie09 first year HS Computer Teacher from Manitou Springs High School

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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Sara24lynn: #forevertie09 Hello! I am a library media specialist in a K-5 school in Greeley, Colorado.

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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lbreed: #forevertie09 Hi! Lisa from Evergreen Middle School! I am looking forward to learning about authentic assessments.

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: Name is Matthew (obvi). Work in DPS. #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:08 PM GMT ·
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Sara24lynn: #forevertie09 Audioboo.fm is an audio tool for iPhone My audioboos http://audioboo.fm/profile

Jun 23, 2009 08:07 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: @forevertie09 mind being blown; didn’t realize so many tools out there that I didn’t know about. Not in the know at 25?? #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:03 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: How do you use audio to capture learning? Call 646-402-5701 x 25286 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 08:00 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:54 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: I’m getting real-time search results at TweetGrid http://tweetgrid.com/ #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:54 PM GMT ·
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RickTanski: @jenwagner Slide 10 on http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/1117 #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:51 PM GMT ·
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toniobarton: #forevertie09 I like http://www.vocaroo.com/ recording website, easy to use.

Jun 23, 2009 07:50 PM GMT ·
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dlevesque: vocarro does not work on a eeepc #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:47 PM GMT ·
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erhubbell: @bhwilkoff Hi everyone! Looking forward to great conversations today. #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:39 PM GMT ·
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matthewadennis: Will the iPhone be forever, Ben? #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:31 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: @bhwilkoff was giving it rave reviews! RT @courosa: @zemote I see Edmodo on the screen at #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:29 PM GMT ·
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sroseman: #forevertie09 how do i get rid of the echo

Jun 23, 2009 07:29 PM GMT ·
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zemote: @courosa awesome!!!! thanks for letting me know #forevertie09 , if anyone has questions, forward them on

Jun 23, 2009 07:28 PM GMT ·
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courosa: @zemote I see Edmodo on the screen at #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:27 PM GMT ·
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courosa: #forevertie09 re: learning that lasts 4ever,think about boyd’s media attributes” persistence,replicability,searchability,invisible audience

Jun 23, 2009 07:25 PM GMT ·
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dlevesque: #forevertie09 why last forever?

Jun 23, 2009 07:23 PM GMT ·
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RickTanski: @bhwilkoff Hello from an office in Colorado Springs #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:22 PM GMT ·
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McTeach: @bhwilkoff Hello from Sunny Northern California! #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:22 PM GMT ·
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ericolsen: Will the computers ever work?#forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:20 PM GMT ·
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courosa: #forevertie09 Hey Ben, hi from the St. Louis airport, soon to get back to Canada.

Jun 23, 2009 07:20 PM GMT ·
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villagegreen: Sitting in on design with forever in mind at tie #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:20 PM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Say hello to all of the folks at #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:19 PM GMT ·
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RickTanski: @bhwilkoff 3 hour session! I’m going to kill some bandwidth bits for sure. #cotie09 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:10 PM GMT ·
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mjmontagne: tuning in to a bit of @bhwilkoff ‘s workshop #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 07:09 PM GMT ·
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debh2u: RT @bhwilkoff: Session wiki page http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/1117 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 10:53 AM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Session wiki page http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/1117 #tie09 #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 05:55 AM GMT ·
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bhwilkoff: Creating a hashtag for my session tomorrow at #tie09. Come and Join in the session with #forevertie09

Jun 23, 2009 05:54 AM GMT ·
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Design with Forever in Mind [ 34:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1042)

1 Comment.

Communal living

Published on May 10, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

I never realized just how important community was to me until my wife
and I asked our best family friends to come and live with us while
they are saving up to buy a house.

For many years I have written about online communities as being an
essential part of authentic learning. Yet, I have never lived in such
close quarters to another family, and thus did not know how much is
learning by being a part of a close-knit real-life community.

Daily I learn what actions by my children and theirs “really mean”. I
now know why personal space has so much value. I know what to expect
from our community and what my community expects of me.

The reason for this post is that it has gotten me thinking about our
need for a nurtured real-life community that supports everything we
attempt to change in education. While I would like to think that the
twittersphere is all that I need for support and community, I need the
people that I can look straight in the eye and brainstorm the greatest
learning activity with.

I guess I will just state this idea as a challenge to myself: if I am
not cultivating my real community as hard as I am doing so for my
online community, I will never be able to accomplish all of the things
I would like.

Or, to put it another way:

The number of people you can touch with your work depends upon how you
work with the people you can literally touch. (Although, that sounds a
little creepier than I wanted.)

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

1 Comment.

The cost of not doing anything…

Published on April 18, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

I was in a great meeting this week where we were considering whether
or not to go ahead with a full scale implimentation of the Moodle LMS
for assessment purposes in our district. It was a great meeting not
because of the topic but the way it was being handled.

We were talking about the absolute costs of an open source LMS and of
staying with a custom-built assmessment solution. We were really
looking for a venn diagram moment when one of the curriculum and
instruction representatives said something really smart: “There is a
cost to not doing anything as well. It may not be a dollar cost, but
it will cost the teachers the ability to know more about their kids’
knowledge and it will cost the kids some learning opportunities.”
(Paraphrased by me.)

Too often we do not think about the cost of doing nothing or of doing
things too slowly. Does appathy in the face of huge choices cost our
kids the best learning years of their lives?

So, it got me thinking: What are the costs of doing nothing (or doing
very little) to change school?

Share an idea if this makes you think as much as it has made me.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

1 Comment.

Twitter and Google Reader for Productivity

Published on April 10, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

(All quotations are not exact, but paraphrases of much better words that were in the mouths of the participants – These are notes, but I think that they might have benefit to others, so I am posting them on my blog as well)

I just wanted to use this space in order to make sure that we take note of all of our discussion surrounding how to use twitter and google reader for productivity.

“We don’t want to jump on the bandwagon with all new products. But, where does iGoogle, twitter, and blog feeds fit in our district’s overall vision.”

“Just because things are free, doesn’t mean we should be using them and promoting it.”

“Conceptually, the idea of everything coming to you is very inciting, but we need to look further at it from the Google Reader perspective and Twitter.”

“The real question is where do we spend our time? What is really of value?”

“Television news is too slow. I want to be able to know more about the things that I am interested in. I want it to be hyperlinked.”

“I don’t have enough time to consume things in a serial manner. I don’t want to know what happened yesterday before I know what happened today.”

“White papers are specific enough. I want relevancy and making sure that it is current.”

Decide on your purpose for using feeds. What information would you like to be able to access that you can’t currently?

Topics to look at:

Stimulus and education

CDE does a good job of talking about the stimulus, but they don’t have a feed.

Broadband and education
Virtual Learning Environments

Making your reading relevant: What are the topics that you would like to come to you?

How do you want information to come to you?

Phone

Go to http://reader.google.com (on your phone)

E-mail

Set up google alerts for terms that you are interested in and have them come directly to your e-mail (http://google.com/alerts )

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Condensation

Published on April 6, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

I was at a restaurant this morning with my family and my wife’s
fingers were getting stickier and stickier from the leaky maple syrup
container. After a while she started looking for some water to wash
them off with. Her water cup was empty but the condensation on the
outside was still there so she used it to clean her hands.

I’m not sure why this sparked something in me, but the act of her
using only the water that was on the outside of the glass made me
think of what is happening in many school districts that I see around
me.

We can see the water, the life giving liquid inside, but we have to
settle for the small beads collecting around the outer edge.

We know that the bandwidth that is needed to fully share with one
another the media, ideas and resources of our district is available.
It exists for businesses and other entities out there, but in
education we are stuck with the runoff from those large high speed
pipes.

We need a straw, but we are stuck licking at the glass.

(The preceding metaphor is stretched pretty thin, but I did want to
get it out there just in case someone else found it useful.)

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

1 Comment.

Too busy to work on workflow

Published on March 26, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

The other day I was working with the principal of our online school on
creating a workflow for contacts, email, and calendar that would allow
her to add, read, and create from anywhere, meaning more productivity
for her.

I am pretty convinced that we need to be addicted to creating a better
workflow for ourselves, but that is a longer blog post. The reason for
this one was that Chris Lehman left a comment on my last post
expressing that he had a similar idea of people who were just too
busy. His post is right here:

And here is my comment on it:
http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?url=archives/361-Hardest-Working-Teacher-Syndrome.html

I recognize that this happens everywhere. I love that you have a
better name for it, though. (The hardest working teacher in the
building syndrome)

I know that you were talking about teachers when you wrote it, but I
really think that admin and IT need this post quite a bit.

The lack of help, support, and sharing that goes on because we are too
busy is truly troubling. Taking time to recognize that busy (or hard
working) is no excuse for not sharing what you are working on or
taking time to see what others are working on.

I think recognizing that an addiction to finding a workflow that
actually works is not optional anymore. If a teacher or admin is “too
busy”, their workflow is probably out of whack. That doesn’t get
talked about enough in our conversations. We just assume that others
aren’t duplicating efforts all over the place because we don’t.

If everything (our learning) is connected, nothing is out of place,
meaning that we don’t have to add more, we just make it flow better.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

1 Comment.

Making moving easy…

Published on March 18, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

Every night this week and last I have been packing. I have been
packing up my family to move us to someplace better, with more room
and more possibilities (and more than one bathroom). This move has
gotten me thinking a lot about what to keep and what to let go of.
Without extending a metaphor too far out, it has also gotten me
thinking about how to move an entire school or even a district from
digital learning systems that they currently use, to ones that have
more possibility and room to grow.

And, what can we leave behind in this move. When you move from an
email based system of communication to a feed and “friend” based
system of communication (twitter, facebook, or even project wikis),
what is no longer neccessary?

When you move from a server based architecture for storing learning
objects to a cloud based repository, what is gained and what is lost?

The specifics are becoming more and more clear to me as I pack things
up. As I pack up our assessments for the online school, getting them
ready to move again, we can leave behind proprietary formats. We need
to be able to plug them in anywhere and reuse them for many purposes.

As I pack up all of our content, I realize that we can leave all html
pages without an edit button on them.

And, as I try to put all of our tools and resources for collaborative
and connected learningn into their box to be ported over to a new LMS
or to new PD spaces, I am realizing that there is no box big enough to
hold all of them.

Every tool must be allowed to connect to others, just like every
person must be able to connect. If there are tools that do not
connect, they will be packed away permanantly and placed under the
stairs.

Well, I am off to pack some more, but I will continue to think about
what can and can’t be thrown out when we make big shifts in education.
I hope to return to this theme soon when I figure more out.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

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I bought a house today!

Published on March 6, 2009, by Ben Wilkoff in Uncategorized.

: Image by Azhure* via Flickr

This post doesn’t have a whole lot to do with educational technology, but I really had to let everyone who might care to know that my family is moving into a new house. It is our absolute dream home.

I have toyed with the idea of putting up the video tour that I did in order to show my parents, but I’m not totally sure that anyone that reads my blog casually really needs that kind of a detailed view of where my children sleep. If you truly would like to have that kind of voyeurism in your life, send me a direct message on Twitter.

For now, though, just know that I am happy with our decision, and that I cant wait to move in.

3 Comments.

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Learning is Change

Staying away

Communal living

Twitter and Google Reader for Productivity

I bought a house today!

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