What I’m learning: Vyou – Conversational Video

I was looking for a service to do video-based discussions. I think this may work quite well. We shall see if it works itself into any of my workflows, though.

VYou:

“VYou allows people to broadcast video structured as conversations, offering the most personal form of social interaction on the web. It works like this: you record video responses to messages entered by friends and fans. VYou organizes their messages and your videos into conversations, making the experience feel continuously live even though the content is stored.

VYou lets you get advice from experts, interact with your favorite celebrity or organization, or communicate with friends and family using a social presence that persists even when you’re away. As a simple application it can be embedded and posted anywhere on the web giving you tremendous power and creative control.”

Twitter and Google Reader for Productivity

A question

This is a really interesting question.

First, if you are looking for engaging videos to show for professional development, I would look here:
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/resources/videos-for-pd/

As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?

Places like http://classroom20.com, or http://supportblogging.com, or even something as specific as http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ would work well to figure out just how deep the topic goes with your teachers.

As for an article, I like http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94, many of the posts from http://weblogg-ed.com, or any of the presentations at slideshare about educational technology.

If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

A list of tags…

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?

Online Learning and Web 2.0: OL Teach 2008 (Secondary)

Online Learning and Web 2.0: OL Teach 2008 (Elementary)

The Ripe Environment: The Markers

The “I know it when I see it” form of collaboration is no longer valid.

We need new ways to tell if learning is happening through group contribution. We need to be able to assess collaboration, but we can’t do it the same way that we assess writing or proficiency. Those skills are much easier to boil down to a continuum or rubric. Others have tried, and we have been for the most part satisfied with their traditional, enigmatic, and mostly non-educational continuums for collaboration.

These forms, however, are not worthy of our cause. They provide us with a way to see things in an abstract sense, showing a fictional path to collaboration that is just as hopeless as using the term as a buzzword to show that change is occurring.

Instead, I would like to outline the types of collaboration that occur in The Ripe Environment. These are the markers that we should be striving for and looking for:

1. Learning objects to be used by multiple learners, created by multiple learners. (This does not include one person writing or creating and the others supplying their input. True collaboration means that everyone has their fingerprints on the potting wheel.)
2. Collaborative asynchronous lists. (Never underestimate the power of listing. And yet, the power is not in the listing. It is in the reordering, reorganizing, and reconstituting a list. Think of wiki collaboration here.)
3. A followable thread of discussion (This can be through linking, commenting, or something like voicethread)
4. Shared Space with over 10 revisions (Any object or space that has been edited or revised more than ten times by multiple authors can be considered a respectable work of collaboration).
5. A mash-up or remix of anything (This type of collaboration marker is the halmark of true collaboration. The best examples are when the masher doesn’t know the mashee. That is when the unintended (but most amazing) concequences of sharing and collaboration kick in.)

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. What are the other markers of collaboration in The Ripe Environment?

The Ripe Environment: Backchannels exist.

Whether we provide students or teachers with a backchannel, one will form. So long as there is more than one voice in a learning environment, the need to be heard will be undeniable.

Students may pass notes or they may text message in their pockets.

Teachers may point to a highlighted passage or simply make a face of disgust.

These things are not meant to stay in the background. They are essential, and as such, must be elevated to their rightful place in the classroom. The backchannel must influence the front-channel and must become the front-channel if the discussion and learning going on there is more important.

But, before I get too ahead of myself, let me set my definition of a backchannel:

A backchannel is the running commentary (critiques on, questions about, distractions from, references for, resources under) the dominant information stream. This dominant stream could be a lecture, discussion, video, or any other attention getting activity that would normally occupy the majority of the learners.

This may sound like quite a distraction. Why should we bring the note passers into the discussion? Why should we encourage distraction? Because it is how we learn.

Kelly Christopherson does a really great job of highlighting how a backchannel actually functions in a Ripe Environment, but I think the hardest thing to understand about a backchannel is balencing the two things that inherently have to go on within an classroom, but are not always so center stage. He says it this way:

Watching the crowd made me realize that we have a long way to go as educators. Many people in the room seemed to be having difficulty with the two things going on at once. Maybe that is why so many educators become frustrated with the use of cellphones or laptops in their classes; they don’t see how the two things can be going on at once.

The rapid fire writing down of resources, texts, or quotations is all well and good during a class or PD session, but what about questioning those things. When does that happen? If all learning is conversational and requires relationships, when are those relationships born and when do those conversations occur? They occur during the backchannel, if and only if one is set up and is relevant to those in the audience.

The experience that Kelly describes above is one that happens far too often. Those who do not find the backchannel relevant write it off as distracting, or worse, destructive. They want the front-channel to be the only channel, even though their brains and pens are commenting non-stopped on what is being said. We need to teach the value of commentary, fact-checking and questioning. We need to construct The Ripe Environment for the backchannel.

The Ripe Environment: Collaboration as Instinct

I sat at the over-long table, as I always do on Mondays and thought about the next time I would meet my students for Extended Learning Time (our version of a multi-discipline course without any set curriculum or standards to give guidance or restrict us).

“Well, it is earth day in a couple of days.”

Immediately, my colleague and I started a Google Document called Earth Day 2008. We started dropping in links to pages we found.

“Oh, I did hear something about an event on the National Geographic Channel. Did you hear about it. Something about the human footprint.”

We were pushing hard now, 25 minutes before kids arrive. Link after link being proposed as a starting point.

“What is the question we are really trying to get our kids to answer here.”
“Is Earth Day important and why?”

And we we started writing out a discussion, a plan of attach. We eventually came to the conclusion that there were others who were interested in asking this same question, experts even. And yet, within 30 minutes we created an authentic question and activity around it. Our instinct was to create and collaborate, rather than offer worksheets as an attempt at lesson planning. This is our Ripe Environment, and the class that the students came into that day was Ripe too.

They couldn’t wait to see who had the bigger footprint. They couldn’t wait to collaborate on their own weekly or monthly collection of soda cans or milk jugs. This process of not waiting to be told, of instinctively knowing that it is the right thing to do, that makes it truly authentic.

So, how do you foster this instinct for collaboration. Well, by saying yes to it as often as possible. It is my personal belief that there is never too little time to create, too little time to collaborate.

If you have only a minute:

1. Put a request for a resource out on twitter.
2. Do a delicious search instead of a google search (it is a community of people waiting to help).
3. Link to someone who is talking about it.

If you have a half-hour:

1. Start a google doc and invite a few others to join in.
2. Search technorati for new blogs, videos, and people who are interested in the same thing.

If you have a longer:

1. Start a wiki and get people to contribute.
2. Start a blog and get people to contribute.
3. Start a movement and get people to join.

Live Blogging With AHS students.

On
Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of listening to some of the most
unique voices in the discussion over Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.
These voices did not come from an “expert” being paid thousands of
dollars for a breakfast engagement. They did not come from a literary
analyst who picked apart Pink’s prose with perfect clarity and wit.
They came from Arapahoe high school students that were eager to create a conversation, expansive and intense. Check out the discourse for yourselves.

We
took a look at one of Pink’s chapters specifically: Story. I especially
liked how the conversation evolved over the course of the hour that we
blogged. It seemed to start from a place of pure story, then it evolved
into something about the future of the workplace. Then we got very
theoretical. We started talking about how story can influence memory
and how memory influences story. Even though Pink devotes quite a bit
of time to this idea, I really like the way the students were able to
incorporate it into their thinking. It really got me to start
reflecting on what the purpose of crafting learning environments can
be.

If we create an environment that is ripe enough to learn
within then we are creating an experience; we are crafting the story of
that learning. In turn that learning becomes a memory, one that will be
told over and over as a story if it is good enough. So, in truth, we
are trying to create learning memories for students, ones that they
will hold onto long after they have forgotten the names of their
classmates or what day of the week it was on. We want to create
memories that are so lasting that the events take on mythical
proportions, they start living on as stories of their own.

Is
there a way of analyzing the ways in which we tell stories about our
high school experience to our friends from that time period? Is there a
way to know whether or not those experiences were learning based or
extraneous (not that they were bad things, mind you)? My question to
those students, and to anyone who reads this blog is what is a learning
memory that you have? What is the one experience in an authentic
learning environment that you will never be able to forget?

(Special thanks to Karl Fisch for setting up this amazing opportunity. More of this kind of collaboration and conversation is needed desperately.)