SpeedGeek Learning Version .1

Conflict of interest

I accidentally posted this too soon, but here is the official version
of this idea (which is bound to change at some point).
 
What does it mean when you are faced with the following challenge:
 
The place that you work has given you the freedom to explore different
learning platforms, work with creative people, collaborate on process,
policy, and pedagogy, and the means to not have to say no too often.
 
The future you see for education is different than what is being planned.
 
The opportunities to branch out and create your own learning spaces
have never been more numerous or more engaging.
 
The community you actively engage in advocates for open communication
and documentation of every move forward that you make with your own
learning.
 
The boundaries on that communication have never been more clear: “Some
meetings are secret.”
 
The platforms for learning and support that you use are at odds with
“having someone on the other end of the line” when something goes
wrong.
 
So, what here is a conflict of interest. Can all of this coexist and
not create chaos, unrest or animosity between my job, my network, my
living, and my passion?
 
(Too vague? Give me a few months, and perhaps specifics will surface.)

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Twitter and Google Reader for Productivity

Condensation

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.)

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Making moving easy…

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.

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Challenging question…

Earlier today I was talking with a colleague that I highly respect who was challenging the premise of my blog post from yesterday.
 
She was saying that if I truly wanted to recast education as a new character that I would need to define what it is that I can do with connected learning and technology that I can’t do otherwise.
 
This particular teacher (and tech integration specialist) has a wonderful way of pushing me to think about whether something like google docs is really any better than butcher paper and different colored markers. Whenever she asks questions like this, I really do take pause. So I put it to you. What is it that we can do now that isn’t just the logical extension of what has come before? What collaborative exercise is not just a gallery walk in disguise? (I have my ideas, but I would like to see if anyone wants to take the same bait that I was given.)
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The On Button Archive

While I was doing some searching over at Tweetgrid (my absolute favorite way of looking at twitter in real-time), I came across these notes from my Educon 2.1 Session, The On Button: Instant and Always on Collaboration.

I figure that now is as good a time as any to put up the archive of that presentation and to highlight just how good Live Blogging can be. Sarah, a teacher in “midcoast Maine”, did a wonderful job of capturing the questions and ideas from the conversation that we had at Educon.

I love the idea of being able to archive not only the video of a conversation, but also the conversation that happened about the conversation. Here is a list of links that also were talking about this session. I can’t wait to hear where else this session goes:

1. List of Sessions
2. Twitter Feed for the session
3. The original Wiki page

What I am more interested in, though, is how are you aggregating the conversations that surround a learning event? How can we make sure that the supports for our sychcronous environments do not go by the wayside.

A wiki spreadsheet.

I have to say that up until recently I didn’t see what was so great about spreadsheets. I have been using them for years to analyze student achievement data and present findings to others, but the didn’t seem like the “killer-app” that so many others seem to be thinking about.
 
On the other hand, my wife speaks in spreadsheets and she can really make them sing. She can have fields reference across fifteen different sheets and set up a budget in a matter of moments.
 
This is extremely cool if all you want to do is present information or figure out what makes sense in terms of data, but as a collaborative process, I just didn’t see it.
 
That was until Google Spreadsheets started opening up anonymous access to spreadsheet using forms and protected links. I started using google forms in order to record interest in our district’s online school (http://edcsd.org). This proved an effective way of collecting specific information and storing it in a place that could be accessed from everywhere. So, in this sense, it was a mass collaboration that was added to with every entry. No one really is able to see the scale of the collaboration, that is, except for me.
 
Well that was a neat trick, but it is nothing compared to the idea of a spreadsheet wiki. One feature that was just added to google spreadsheets is the ability to share a link with others that will let others edit it without having to sign up for a google account.
 
This means that students could record data on the same spreadsheet without having to sign in. It means that achievement data (not on specific students, though) could be aggregated in one place, all without having to teach an entire staff about a new service. It means that you could keep track of all of your school’s goals with everyone adding their notes, never having to go through the extra hoop of remembering a password.
 
Perhaps best of all, it would allow all of those who do not yet see the value of massively-collaborative projects to participate in one without ever knowing about it and by using a tool they already recognize as important: spreadsheets.
 
Perhaps I am making too much out of this. Perhaps there are other tools that do this already, but as I am on a search for ways to eliminate as many logins as possible, this is one great step in the right direction.
 
Do you see any new ways of using this? Are spreadsheets more valuable now?
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Feeds in a workflow.

For as useful as they are for aggregating information, rss feeds are not all that easy to put into one’s workflow. You have to make a point of going to a special page and maintaining your reading list. Google reader (http://reader.google.com) makes it pretty easy to do this, but you still have to make a habit of going there.
 
At one point (not that long ago), I had over 2000 unread posts in my aggregator. It seemed unlikely that I would ever be able to sift through it all and pull off any kind of conclusions. I was under the infamous guilt of falling behind. More than that, I felt like my PLN was leaving me behind.
 
Well, no longer. I have found a way to make my rss feeds more immediate, a way for my feeds to literally alert me to their presence. Enter http://snackr.net/. This Air application (good on any platform) is the only way I have figured out to put feeds onto my screen in the way that Tweetdeck or Twhirl has done for my twitter account. I no longer go to google reader for anything other than maintenance because it syncs directly with Reader. If you have enough room on your screen for one more way to connect, I would recommend Snackr highly. If only for the ability to show others that Rss is not abstract. It is real, and it is a powerful way of exploring connected and authentic learning.
 
Reflective aside: What would anyone think of a collaboratively maintained educational Google Reader account that could be used by Snackr apps in schools? Which feeds should be included and why? Is it just one more thing or would this kind of workflow influence allow for real change?
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Head on over to…

Head on over to Kevin Honeycutt’s driving questions podcast at http://kevinhoneycutt.org/ and click on the driving questions podcast. I had a great conversation with him this morning about change in schools and ways to create instant and always on collaboration. I will be posting my audio and notes from the conversation but his is already up because he is much more diligent at getting things online.

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