live from the Radcliffe Gymnasium @ Harvard square. Updates will continue to pipe out as the day rolls on. The one gap will be at my presentation.
After a short introduction from Ed Lyons,
here is Dave Tosh of Elgg to give the keynote.
- Discusses pros and cons of web services:
- Pros – free, easy, existing, allows long-term access to course work (beyond the term of the course)
- Cons – how do these services make money from/for you? is it exploitative to post content from younger children? b/c it is posted on the internet, semi-private content is always made more-public.
- Data Ownership – major dilemma
- if you think you should own your own data, why then do people elect to use free services where they give their data to the companies
- Identity Management – who should own personality traces?
- Interoperability – How can the data move from institution to institution? How do you pool content together?
- Don’t assume that because students use Facebook, that they are tech savvy? – the social re-enforcement of learning facebook doesn’t exist in educational software experiences.
Chris Sessums- Roll your own communities
- Suspects that education is still a little behind on the use of creative/educational technology
- “rolling your own” – from cigarette habit, the ritual of cigarette production — rolling your own allows you to slow down the process of production and become more conscious
- Alludes to “Cultivating Communities of Practice” – Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002)
- Design for Evolution
- Open dialogue between inside and outside perspectives
- Invite different levels of participation
- etc.
- Group flow — Keith Sawyer (2008) — focused on business organizations, sports teams, jazz combos
- a shared goal
- close or deep listening to each other
- Complete concentration
- being in control of group’s action and environments
- blending of egos
- equal participation
- member’s familiarity
- constant communication with one another
- elaboration of each other’s ideas
- Chris considers “design” the real underlying goal/theme of educators
- its more than just tools,
- emphasizes “ease” of use of technology
- emphasizes “rules” that govern that community collaboration – should they emerge organically? can they be implemented top-down?
Control: Top-down, leadership, organic development?
- “social artist” – anthropologist, uses social systems and creates them
- passions are contagious – willful, collaborative, capable, social, inspiring
Learning community
- if want to create to change, we need more than tools, we need a strategy
- it’s like three or four artists painting on the same canvas at the same time
- in the classroom, we are trying to get students to work/think together.
- rules = trust –> state of equilibrium that everyone in a group feeds into
- strategy = results
- we often see people focus on tactics –> the problem with tactics, is that they fail
- what happens when tactics? –> we question the strategy, we go back to the drawing board
Conclusions
- educational institutions are slow to react to changes
- research suggests that when real innovation comes along: its when we take technology for granted, not seeing it, using it seamlessly
- we need to know where we want to go, and then consider how/what compliments that direction
FuseFly Presentation
Basic overview:
- social network designed for home-schoolers:: a fascinating inter-family education community begging lots of questions
- great deal of discussion about the moderation/censorship of student posts
- student moderators are used to seek out inappropriate content
- student moderators are given extra rights –> power users with the ability to ban/kick-out other students –> get icons with profiles allowing them to appear as “the cool kids” or not
- Finding balance is key –> separation of student & parent areas
- discussion of documentation –> the site allowed students to author the documentation, a fascinating option/crowdsourcing of the difficulties
From an LMS to Elgg
- first, definition for those, who like me don’t know the technical definition of “LMS” –> “Learning Management System”
- Follows the experience of Education Profs teaching teachers through the Extension School
- One of the primary reasons for getting away from the LMS used by Harvard was the fact that the server’s were reset/erased every year, destroying everyone’s records and working, and making linking to work impossible
- the instructors (and one assumes, the students) desired e-portfolios
- “we didn’t want to be tech support” –> Elgg allowed for simple straight-forward development that wouldn’t be too torturous for students
- Really nice chart –> hopefully i can find a link
- Discussion board stopped working –> What happened?
- Apparently, when the door was opened to web-based social networks (Elgg, Facebook, etc.) students switched over to web-services completely, and abandoned the LMS
- So the instructors decided to move completely into world 2.0
- Blog vs. Discussion Board –> Blog became a “product” that was happily endorsed by students because it allowed their work to have a potential of wider dissemination
- FINALLY! Somebody mentions “DELICIOUS”
- Apparently the Elgg social bookmark system is better? But more difficult to use/longer to use? Must inspect?
- After using Elgg, the instructors were brought before the Harvard LMS Inquisition, where it turns out all the LMS people wanted to know is what they could do better/why move to Elgg.
- Teaching for Understanding” –> Bigger, messier, teaching experience –> expanding in all directions
- Books! A Whole New Mind & The Global Achievement Gap
TeachPaperless Guy is on to Talk about Twitter
- The conversation gets meta –> twitter is now the indispensable back-channel for this discussion
- “21st century skills is being able to engage in a global flow of information as never before”
- “if you’re a 21st century teacher and you’re not using two projectors, you’re missing out”
- “140 characters is just a directional text interface”
- the projector comment really got the crowd going, can anyone/everyone afford this?
- tweets are the method de jour of this Latin teacher’s education
- important collaborative manner
- students are allowed to use lifelines in this Latin classroom –> all students can tweet during tests or quizzes.
- EDITORIAL NOTE: What about the student support for social networks? Doesn’t it always feel like homework?
- Anyway, the student perceptions and responses from TeachPaperless are generally good and endorsing it.
- “this was not a top-down twitter, in fact, I said please un-block twitter?”
- PARENT REACTION: Very positive, believed the technology pulled the students in
Alright, I’m back. really fun time talking with some knowledgable and trained people.
Also, missed blogging the Ning chat, which was fascinating
“Social Networking for the K-12 Set”, by Jim Klein
First, some numbers.
- 96% of 9-17 year olds are using social networks –> 9/hrs week same as much as TV
- 70% schools ban social networks
- Facebook is meant to be a place for kids/teens –> a context for misbehaving
- hilarious site: http://myparentsjoinedfacebook.com/
- Jim demos his school’s Elgg, which lists no classes, no teachers, just kids having fun.
- sample discussion: kids designing then comparing/contrasting layouts for a classroom
- Everybody enjoys watches a fun kid called mark read a story & talk about his podcasting
- Podcasting math –> wow, 6th grade looks much better than i remember
- connections not boundaries –> jim klien emphasized education as a cross-grade, cross-class, cross-discipline experience
- Responsible tools & responsible guidelines –> one of the challenges of these things is getting students, parents and teachers to responsibly use the software and be fair about what they post.
- seymour paper quote ends it out
”Social Networking Lessons from the Obama Campaign”, by Leonard Lin
- Blue State Digital –> democratic digital solutions
- Hilarious digital speak for a sidetrack of story –> “/aside”
- Don’t re-invent the wheel –> the code that powered Obama’s campaign was first developed in 2004, as well as lots of open source projects that pre-exist this.
- It’s hard writing code during a campaign
- Email –> we all know how important this stuff is/was
- The groups function was kind of a failure
- Many people didn’t get into the groups option, few people got involved into “friending”
- Chris Hughes, the facebook guy who left facebook for Obama
- Affinity groups were really the best option/most practical popular part of the “mybo” (mybarackobama.com) thing
- In general, affinity groups are where politicians discover the real issues thru social media
- 14.5 million hours of Obama youtube watched thru the campaign: a conservative estimate because of longer sized clips
- Here comes the data-porn slide which i do not have enough time to
- The competition didn’t have a major social space until August, then they published “McCainSpace” which Lin admits was slicker, more capable than MyBO, but may have been too little too late.
- Obama site shared all the official high-res images
- Funny examples were that a lot of people made creative use of the official brand logos, including a “barns of obama” thing – http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ohbarns
- You must keep track of all of your data/traffic –> powerful tools for figuring out where people are, and where they need to go.
- “Not everything will Launch” –> MyBO had a social news section that was in development, but never came to published fruition.
- Duh! “Social tools are made of people” “people make it work” –> a good bottom line