Learning is Change

I was asked to give a presentation on Social Networking for Non-Profits and more specifically, facebook, and so here is my best shot at a number of resources that get at the core of this subject.

1. The unavoidable Common Craft video on Social Networks
2. A summary of a bit of research on Non-Profits using Social Networks. (Direct Link to Research)
3. The few documents that make the most sense for this topic:

• Facebook Pages for Non-Profits
• Facebook for Non-Profit Beginners
• Facebook Pages for Viral Marketing
• Promote your Cause on Facebook
• 8 Secrets of Effective Online Networking
• Determining your Organization’s Social Networking Needs

1. Important resources and blogs for Nonprofits and social media:

• Beth Kantor’s Blog
• Tech Soup – The Technology Place for NonProfits
  
• Using Social Networks to Create Social Change Presentation:
Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More

View more presentations from Ivan Boothe.

I will be updating this list over the next day or so, but let me know if there are any glaring omissions.

Because of my deep love of words, I have always been very excited by unique writing projects (such as NanoWriMo and Myths and Legends), but this one is by far the best thing I have seen in a very long time.

If you haven’t seen 1,000,000 Monkeys yet, please go there now and check it out. It is basically a writing space that allows you to collaboratively create a story based upon the idea that socially choosing the path for the story will end up making for a much more interesting read. The possibilities are endless for this type of writing, but I will let their FAQ explain it a little better:

This site attempts not only to harness the literary power of one million “monkeys” typing but also to generate some truly wonderful texts and social networks. It is part Exquisite Corpse, part Choose Your Own Adventure, and it works by having multiple authors work on the same stories with each adding their own segments. Each segment (or snippet) will have the opportunity for 3 offshoots — those that are ranked highly will gain offshoots of their own, and those that are ranked poorly will wither and die.

If I were in the classroom, I would be using this site for the rest of the school year to write a story that twists and turns around every writing thought my students could build upon. However, since I am not, I will need to live vicariously through someone else. If anyone else uses 1,000,000 monkeys before the year is out, let me know. I think it is just BANANAS (pun most definitely intended).

So, Any Takers?

I believe that I have been looking for this capability for a solid year, but I was only able to figure it out today. It can be described most easily as: Converting a folder of html files into a format that can be edited and manipulated by an LMS.

Before today, these were the things that I tried:

1. Creating an iFrame embed for each important file and reconstructing a navigation for those files
2. Linking to the files on a webserver and hoping for the best
3. Importing individual files to Google Docs and then fixing all of the broken images and links. (This allows for editing easily as long as you are signed into your google account, but it is a lot of extra work to create the files)
4. Researching the heck out of nearly every online hosting solution that integrates with an LMS to no avail.

Today, however, was a different story.

Today I found this.

It is a book module for Moodle, but really it is more than that. It is the single largest time saver I have ever run into. I can select a folder that I have uploaded to the Site Files and it will import all of the HTML, remake the relative links into links within the book itself, and rework all image files to work within the book. It creates a tree structure for the files. It allows you to print the entire book or only one chapter, and you can even export the entire thing as a IMS file (a standard format for elearning resources).

So, now I can go from HTML that has do be downloaded, edited offline, and uploaded again into a single editable (IMS compliant) book that can be enhanced with pretty much anything you can create on a webpage.

I can think of about a hundred different reasons why this is a good thing for teachers to be able to do with their content, but I will leave you with just one:

Download anything you see on the web as a webpage and add it to your book.

Literally, everything becomes importable.

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

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?

Where I to be totally honest with myself:

1. I would stop whatever I am doing and find the nearest classroom to teach in.
2. I would continually say to those that ask for my advice on such matters that I have never taken nor taught an online-only course.
3. I would admit that I care about the number of followers I have on twitter for reasons that I do not completely understand.
4. I would realize that not having read an entire novel in over a year is not okay with me.
5. I would tell everyone that I don’t have the ability to follow through on all of the projects to which I have currently committed myself.

One of the consistent complaints (and most often heard form of resistance to using open source software) about Moodle is that it lacks any formal support structure. While there is a great community over at Moodle.org, there isn’t anyone that you can call in the middle of the night when you want something to work. So, we have to build that function into any system that we need. In fact, I have been given the task of drawing up an initial draft of how our district would support a school who wants to use Moodle as their LMS.

While I have a lot more thinking to do about this, I would like to share my first draft and solicit any feedback that you would like to provide. Please push me on this as much as you can (I want to make sure that not only is the structure sound but that we are adding to and creating a learning community as much as possible).

Here is the link to the Google Doc in progress.

Here is the diagram of the structure itself:

Thanks for any help you can provide this process. As you may have guessed, you are the PLN that I mention.

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

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

I can’t believe that this service took this long to exist, but my goodness is it cool:

BookGlutton is a site that creates on the fly discussion groups around ebooks. It allows you to chat while you are reading with other readers of the same book. And, if that wasn’t enough, it also allows you to embed those books directly into a webpage. This means that you could put it into a school webpage and then have anyone who reads the book become a part of an ad hoc book club.

The kind of function that allows for writing about books without removing it from the text itself, is nothing short of amazing. I want learning to happen in context, and this lets the context of the written word be the place where it occurs.

Anyway, I would love to know how you would use something like this in your classroom. Here are a few books that you might find useful:

1. Jane Eyre
2. King Lear
3. The Scarlet Letter