Steve Hargadon

Talk About NECC 2009: Post-Conference Recaps, Take-Aways, Brainstorms, and Conversations

2009-07-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

NECC 2009 wrapped up last week, but more than ever we have a chance to capture, as the "audience" or "community" who participated in or followed the show, our thoughts and feelings about what took place. For those parts of the conference that have been "community-generated" (like EduBloggerCon and NECC Unplugged) this is highly practical, as we can try to capture thoughts and ideas for when we start planning next for next year (at which point the conference will be called the ISTE Conference and not NECC, by the way). For the formal parts of the conference that are fully under the control of ISTE (starting with the keynote speakers to everything else), it's a chance for us to give really proactive feedback to an organization that has shown itself very open to both the conversations and the technologies that allow this. My own "grading" of my experiences at NECC I've put in another post.

I am going to use this blog post as a flexible starting place, both to schedule live Elluminate sessions on specific aspects of the conference, and to point to other places where there are discussions already taking place. I'lll start with the events that I had some responsibility for and will gladly expand from there to other events or aspects of the conference that you feel deserve a live "drill-down" session. I'll also post all these sessions in LearnCentral.org's community calendar so you can check there as well.

If you want to set up your own post-NECC discussion in Elluminate, let me know in the comments below! Please also let me know if there are other conversations taking place that I need to link to.

"WHAT WE LEARNED AT NECC"
This is a general brain dump, well-suited for those who attended and those who did not. Not about logistics at all, but just a chance to talk about the learning. What were the significant "aha" moments for you? What speakers spoke to you?

Elluminate Live Session: Saturday, July 11th, from 8am Pacific (11am Eastern) for one hour, just before the Classroom 2.0 LIVE show on Glogster. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/necc09talk
LearnCentral Conversation: http://www.learncentral.org/forums/professional-development/what-we-learned-necc
NECC / ISTE Ning Conversations: http://www.necc2008.org/

"NECC 2009 LOGISTICAL FEEDBACK SESSION"

Elluminate Live Session: TBD (waiting for confirmation of time that ISTE staff members who want to participate are available). Anita McAnear from ISTE wants to be a part of this discussion, so we're primarily waiting to set a time with her.

"EDUBLOGGERCON, BLOGGERS' CAFE, AND NECC UNPLUGGED -- FEEDBACK AND BRAINSTORMING"

Elluminate Live Session: Wednesday, July 8th, at 6pm Pacific (9pm Eastern) for one hour, Immediately following the Future of Education session with Maria Droujkova on Math 2.0 that evening. We'll talk about lessons learned, the logistics, and what we want to do next year around these programs. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/necc09talk

LearnCentral Conversation: http://www.learncentral.org/forums/professional-development/edubloggercon-bloggers-cafe-and-necc-unplugged-feedback-brainstormin

"OPEN SOURCE PAVILION, SPEAKER SERIES, AND NEXT YEAR'S OPENSOURCECON"
This is our fourth year running the Open Source Pavilion, and it's never been so popular. Let us know what you liked and what you didn't, and help us plan for next year. We're especially interested in running a free, all-day OpenSourceCon (like EduBloggerCon) "unconference" next year--what do you think? Would you come?

Elluminate Live Session: Friday, July 10th, 1:00pm Pacific / 4:00pm Eastern. http://tinyurl.com/necc09talk
LearnCentral Conversation: http://www.learncentral.org/forums/professional-development/necc-open-source-pavilion-speaker-series-and-next-years-opensourceco

Hope you'll participate and make your perspective known!

Grading NECC 2009

2009-07-06T06:46:00.001-07:00

Over the past four years NECC has become an increasingly significant event for me and one where I have felt and greatly appreciated the opportunity for the "community" to contribute to increasingly significant aspects of the conference. What started for me four years ago in Philadelphia as a relatively modest opportunity to provide used computer equipment for demonstrating the use of Open Source Software has become a fascinatingly broad range of involvement in user-created aspects of the conference, very much to ISTE's credit.

For my own sake, and to also keep the "audience" discussion going, I want to grade those aspects of the conference where I had involvement.

EduBloggerCon: "A"
I feel comfortable giving our third annual EduBloggerCon a solid "A" this year. Not that the event could not be improved, but we were able to recover the feel from two years ago that made the original EduBloggerCon such a significant event, and we were able to get past some of the "ghosts" from last year that worried me a little. We also have to recognize that EduBloggerCon can't be, ever again, what it was that first year: the first time most of the edublogger community had met face-to-face. Some of the really "heady" discussions of that first year have of necessity moved to other venues like EduCon where they can be nurtured amongst a more self-selected audience over more than one day; whereas EduBloggerCon is really about the the chance to meet and talk in an environment not only more open to the beginner, but intentionally welcoming to him or her. Which makes me wonder if we need a name change that recognizes that there are a lot of ways in which educators are becoming involved in social media that often aren't directly related to blogging. On the other hand, keeping the name probably helps with recognition and continuity. Feedback and suggestions welcome--I've been playing with the name "sharecamp" which potentially has the added benefit of being more universally usable by many in other venues.

One area of EduBloggerCon in which I'd like to see improvement would be the ability for at least the major sessions of the day to be well-streamed to those not in physical attendance. We tried this year, but what we really needed to do was to pipe the mic system directly into the Elluminate session that was running live--otherwise, it's just too darn hard to hear the sound clearly. The point of EduBloggerCon is the physical being together, but I do think it would be nice to make some of it available to those who can't attend.

Bloggers' Cafe: "B"
This brilliant idea three years ago (or more?) from David Warlick to have a place for the bloggers to gather and talk has become an institution. I honestly don't think many of us could imagine NECC now without it. I can remember when, in talking about EduBloggerCon and the Bloggers' cafe originally, people would say to me: "NECC really isn't relevant for me anymore." I don't think I've heard anything even remotely close to that lately, and in fact, I think ISTE's done such a good job supporting this kind of casual conversation at NECC that 1) NECC has become a must-attend event when there are funds to do so, and 2) the Bloggers' Cafe is such a significant part of the experience that being in there is often seen as more valuable than attending a formal session.

So, why a "B" grade from me? We still haven't figured out how to make this a more inviting experience. I still feels exclusive and can be very intimidating for someone walking by to just come in to a group of people who all seem to know each other and are already very engaged in conversation. Maybe that's just an inherent dilemma, but I'm with those who think that a name change here might also be valuable--this isn't just about blogging anymore. (I think I saw a suggestion to call it the "Personal Learning Plaza.") I'd also argue that we need signage which basically says "Welcome and come on in!" Last year we tried t-shirts that "mentors" could wear and walk around to invite participation, but I'm not sure it there was a really concerted effort to do so. This year Sue Waters made up cool buttons, but somehow I think more is needed. Like EduBloggerCon as well, the potential cost to this openness to beginners is a possible intrusion on our existing conversations, but what are we about if not being inclusive?

NECC Unplugged: "C"
There was never an idea more near and dear to my heart than NECC Unplugged, but an honest assessment of year two of this program is solidly in the "not what it could have been category." I know, we're breaking amazing ground with this program, and those who presented and helped did an EXCELLENT job (my own daughter included--love ya Kate!)--but we need to crank this thing up a little. Roadblocks this year:

Lack of signage that made finding the space very hard on the first day.
Lack of formal A/V support by ISTE. When my own home-grown mic/speaker solution didn't work it meant that the sound experience online was often better than in person (we did to a really good job piping sound directly into the Elluminate session, unlike at EduBloggerCon). If we are going to have a presentation area in the hallway, we've got to have sound amplification...
Lack of planning planning time by a largely absentee coordinator: me. It's OK, we can say it, I just shouldn't have been in charge of one more activity if I couldn't actually be there to oversee it. If it hadn't been for Kate, Peggy George and Meredith Melragon there would not have been an NECC Unplugged this year. Kate allowed me to fly her out last minute and discovered how hard it is that adults actually work at events like these, and TOTAL CHAMPS Peggy and Meredith gave up their own precious NECC time to pitch in and fill in the gaps.

Even with these deficiencies, which I take responsibility for, NECC Unplugged is an amazing concept that I still can't believe we get permission to do. Anyone who wants to can present at NECC, and those who aren't at the show are able to have things to watch directly from the event. I also think that the hybrid physical/virtual conference combination is an amazing model, and Kim Caise deserves a HUGE round of applause for overseeing the EduBloggerCon "remotely" and three days of virtual presentations that took place in Elluminate concurrent with the physical ones. I think I'm also right in sending major "props" to Derrall Garrission who voluntarily supported both for EduBloggerCon's virtual side and NECC Unplugged.

Open Source Pavilion, Playground, and Speaker Series: "A+"
As we've moved over the last four years from an off-the-beaten track demo area to a full room with our own speaking track, the Open Source activities at NECC keep getting better and better. This year, with amazing help from a variety of sponsors, I think people were blown away by the 60-computer "lab"/classroom running Linux thin clients. Especially helpful to me was an amazing volunteer crew, led by Randy Orwin and Benoit St-Andre who got the lab set up in less time and with less of my help than ever before. (Someday we'll look back fondly on all those shows where we trucked in used computers and stayed up until the wee hours of the night patching them together into a usable lab... but for now I'm SO glad those days are passed!) Asus provided the thin clients, Kevin McGuire of Michigan City Area Schools loaned us the flat panel monitors, and Revolution Linux provided the server and the printed brochures and flyers. It's so fun for me to see Open Source move into the realm of the tangible for schools, especially since I make the claim that we will not see computing transform education without Linux and Open Source. With similar Open Source programs we are running at CUE, NSBA's T+L, and now (we think) at FETC, I think we are actually making a difference and increasingly helping schools to see tangible examples of how Open Source can be implemented.

Best idea to come out of the post-show cleanup time: holding a free pre-NECC OpenSourceCon unconference, like EduBloggerCon, but for those interested in Open Source. Wow.

Panels on Open Source and Web 2.0: "A+"
This year I led two panel discussions, one at the very beginning of NECC and one at the end! The first was on the state of Open Source in Education, and it was, in a word, brilliant. The panelists were great, I performed well enough to not interfere with the learning, but it was the audience that amazed me. In a larger meeting room than I would have thought we could fill with people interested in Open Source (and that was completely full), it became clear early on by the questions that were being asked that there are a substantial number of people seriously implementing Linux and Open Source their schools. This was the most surprising moment for me at NECC, and it was enormously satisfying to think of how far this dialog has come. I remember the first NECC talk I gave on Open Source, and how disbelieving I remember the audience being. The Web 2.0 panel, with equally stellar panelists, while it engendered some controversy was still solidly an "A+" for me. First, I made a conscious effort to make the session interactive as a reflection of the participative nature of Web 2.0, and instead of sitting with the panelists I walked the floor with a portable mic. Second, as the last question of the session, I think I asked the best question I've ever asked of a panel: "What did you learn from being on this panel today?" If the bringing together of active minds around a significant topic doesn't produce enough synergy to have the panelists learn along with the audience, then we're just getting the same old "talking heads" kind of stuff. In my mind there's no greater crime at a conference than a panel of experts giving us the worst of both worlds: being asked to each speak individually for 10 minutes when we'd love to hear hours from any one of them them, and then not even getting to hear them argue or interact with each other. Which brings me to the argument side: we got some major push-back from some members of the audience in this session, and it largely had to do with how a back-channel chat was being handled. And I think they were largely valid criticisms. Wahoo--actual learning!

Birds of a Feather Sessions on Open Source and Web 2.0: "B+"
I'm interested in how popular these BOF sessions are, and how the combination of the large number of people who attend with the more general reticence of the "audience" to participate create the temptation turn what I think should be discussion sessions into presentations. In years past when the BOF sessions I was a part of didn't draw so many people, I actually felt like you could go around the group, have people introduce themselves to each other, and then have a conversation. Now I've had to try and find questions and activities that help to engage the crowd in as participative way as possible. There was an "aha" moment for me in this regard in the Web 2.0 BOF. I did a modified version of the "speed demo" program we do at the Classroom 2.0 workshops, combining people being able to quickly demo a Web 2.0 tool with being able to ask the others in the room a question about Web 2.0. It felt a little to me like I was pulling teeth to keep things going, and I would have given the session a true "C" based on how I felt at the end. But after we were done I had a couple of people come up to me and say, essentially, "this was the best session I've had at NECC." I was taken aback by this, and after thinking about it for a while, came to the conclusion that my NECC experiences, which are all so highly interactive, keep me in a little bit of a bubble--and that for many who attend NECC their experiences are still highly passive. That's a good reminder to me that the learning experiences that educators have must parallel their sense of the learning experiences that should take place in the classroom, and the more we can exemplify engaged learning at conferences the more we're encouraging that kind of learning environment in the classroom.

My Individual Presentations on Open Source and Social Networking: "A" / "B-"
I've got a new presentation on Open Source in K-12 that I think is greatly improved over my previous general survey of the landscape, mainly because I have gotten bold enough to say what I really feel: that we will not have ubiquitous or transformative computing in schools without Open Source and Linux. I'm definitely giving with both barrels with this new presentation, so my "A" there reflects my feeling like I am making a difference. My presentation on social networking was disappointing to me, I think partly because I didn't feel I could devote the whole time to talking about my current passion: the combination of the asynchronous networking in social networks with the synchronous capability of Elluminate built into LearnCentral (full disclosure--my paid employment is with Elluminate). Because I'd promised to do a tour of setting up a Ning network as a part of this session, I didn't feel like I had time to do either justice. When you're presenting you don't always hit them out of the park, and that was the case for me here...

The Launch of LearnCentral.org: "A"
Again, making sure that it's clear that I'm an Elluminate employee, and that my role is to serve as community manager of LearnCentral--and making it clear that LearnCentral is still in beta form and very much a work-in-progress that we hope the community will help us steer toward great things--I had a great time talking about LearnCentral with the media, a role I've never really played before. I'm really excited about what Elluminate is committing to with this project, especially the ability for anyone to hold free, public Elluminate sessions, and I found that the discussions with the media about the project were a greater opportunity for me to be enthusiastic and passionate than I expected them to be. Instead of the interview schedule being a burden, I began to look forward to them as a chance to talk about what a significant moment this is in education right now, and how I think Elluminate can help. Plus, having flown solo now for so many shows, organizing volunteers with varying degrees of success, it's fun to watch a well-oiled machine get things done. I'm learning!

A Moonlit-Tour with My Daughter of National Monuments by Pedi-Cab Late Wednesday Night: "Priceless."
I would have felt like a really pathetic parent if, after spending several days with my daughter in Washington, DC, we flew home without actually seeing anything historical. After helping Kate get an autograph and a hug from the charming Erin Gruwell, cleaning up the Open Source Pavilion, and having a late dinner, at 9:00pm we negotiated with a "bike-taxi" driver while it was raining for a 90-minute tour. The rain stopped, the moon came out, and he actually gave us a good two hours. We stopped and spent time with a surprising number of other night-tourists with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR. We saw the Vietnam and Korean War Veterans memorials. And we stopped at the White House for good measure. A lifetime memory.

Overall Grade for NECC: "A"
Great job, ISTE. Thanks for allowing such creativity and balancing so many demands and expectations so well. Special thanks to Anita McAnear, who's gentle shepherding of my activities has made such a difference. You are appreciated!

NECC Unplugged: The Experiment Continues Monday - Wednesday

2009-06-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

So, I'm not sure why ISTE allows me to be so experimental at NECC, but I'm really glad that they do since it's so much fun! EduBloggerCon 2009 was really fun again this year, and while the blog reports on attendance inexplicably vary, over 200 signed up for the Saturday night party, and if I had to guess we had some 125 - 150 who attended for some part of the un-conference day. It just felt intimate again, though, and was a lot less "controlled." The group felt fresh, with a lot of new faces, and I again realized once again that this is what I like and maybe what my true contribution to our community is: helping new educational users of Web 2.0 feel welcomed and supported. Seems like I always gravitate to this even though I personally love the deep drill-down stuff.

Tomorrow the fun continues with NECC Unplugged. My personal NECC hero, Anita McAnear, got or gave permission for us to run this again after our first try last year. This is something of an extension of EduBloggerCon but it runs the whole three days of NECC (starting tomorrow, June 29th) and anyone who wants to can sign up to present in our area. This does something miraculous: it allows for presentations from people who've never gotten to present at NECC before, and it allows for presentations on topics that weren't necessarily current when applications to present were due last fall.

The presentations slots are 30 minutes, and this year we actually have our own separate area across the hall from the Blogger's Cafe. AND we are "Elluminating" (live-streaming) the sessions so that those who aren't attending NECC have an additional way to tap into the conference "live." I spent some time getting ready for tomorrow, since the sound for the Elluminate sessions during EduBloggerCon wasn't great--we've got a separate mic for NECC Unplugged which goes directly into the broadcasting computer, and my 16-year-old daughter Kate has agreed to spend the next three days overseeing the technical since my NECC schedule and my new Elluminate job will keep me pretty darn occupied elsewhere most of the time.

Now, if you are actually at NECC, please note that there are still some empty slots on the wiki available if you want to present something! You can also come over and say "hi" and check up on Kate, who will likely be completely exhausted after the first day and will need the draw of new friendships to agree to come back Tuesday and Wednesday. :)

Another new feature of NECC Unplugged this year is the addition of virtual presentations. So, if you are not attending NECC you can still present to others who may be attending virtually. You also sign up on the wiki to do so, and the ever-amazing Kim Caise, one of the co-hosts of the Classrom 2.0 Live Saturday show, will be helping moderate those sessions. The wiki also has a column for any other "live" links for those watching from afar. If you are aware of any live-blogging or streaming, please add those links in the final column so that others can easily find them.

Finally, if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and want a really progressive activity to attend, Derrall Garrison has arranged a room at Foothill College for those who want to attend NECC remotely and watch the different streams while also having the association of gathering locally. I actually think this is a very cool model for "conference 2.0," where we blend the physical and the virtual, which I think is being done by some and will likely be done by more--imagine being able to attend NECC in 15 different cities "live," with sessions being streamed out to and between all the locations. Fascinating concept! Derrall has reserved Room 4002 at the Krause Center for Innovation at Foothill College from June 28th to July 1st from 8:00AM to 2:00 PM daily. Contact derrallg@gmail if you have any questions.

Angry About the Michael Jackson News Coverage and a Lost Opportunity

2009-06-26T19:46:00.001-07:00

So, I'm in the middle of what are normally the three busiest weeks of the year for my job. Tomorrow a large conference event I run takes place, so I'm in Washington, DC, running around trying to get everything taken care of.

But every chance I've had I've turned on the TV or read news stories on my cell phone, hoping that somebody would take the opportunity to talk about Vitiligo and the likelihood that Michael Jackson actually had Vitiligo and that it would possibly explain the bleaching of his skin... that somebody would actually understand how debilitating Vitiligo can be, take this aspect of his life seriously, and acknowledge the pain that Michael and others with Vitiligo go through. I know there are many other controversial things to talk about regarding MJ, but I have not once heard the word Vitiligo mentioned in any story today--a story which could actually have substance and help others. How can that be?

I have Vitiligo. I'm light-skinned, and I developed it after I was married--so it's impact on me could be considered gentle compared to how emotionally debilitating it can be to those with darker skin for whom personal appearance--especially facial appearance--is much more socially critical. (The photo in this blog post is of Lee Thomas, an Emmy Award-winning TV broadcaster with Vitiligo who uses makeup to cover up his Vitiligo, and who has written a book called Turning White.) I run a growing social network for those with Vitiligo, and this immune disorder, which affects some 1 - 2% of the population, can tear at the hearts of those who have it.

I'm hoping that one of the Vitiligo research organizations has issued or will issue a press release at this time, at least giving some basic information about Vitiligo and shedding some light on what those with Vitiligo go through. I just did a Google search and it appears that MJ originally announced on Oprah that he had Vitiligo--seems like this would be a good story for her. Anyone have any connections?

Classroom 2.0 at 25,000 Members - What Has Social Networking Done for You?

2009-06-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Classroom 2.0 hit 25,000 members. I was remembering that we thought the network was large when we had 500 members, and certainly many things have changed in the last couple of years. When I started Classroom 2.0, nobody knew what a "Ning" was, and there was a *lot* of skepticism that social networking had any place in professional development. :)

If you're willing, would you share how social networking--Classroom 2.0 or any other network you belong to--has impacted you, both personally and professionally? You can answer here or at the Classroom 2.0 thread.

EduBloggerCon is This Saturday and Classrom 2.0 is at 25K--So Let's Have a Party

2009-06-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe, but EduBloggerCon is this Saturday, kicking off for many of us our visit to NECC in Washington, DC. If you're going to be in DC on Saturday, please come for part or all of this free all-day "unconference," now in it's third year. You do not need to be registered for NECC to attend, and we'll have little badges like the one on the left so that you won't have be bothered by security getting in and out of the building during the day. If you're not going to be in DC, you'll be able to watch much of it live-streamed through Elluminate--including our Saturday Night party sponsored by Wikispaces which will also be celebrating Classroom 2.0 reaching 25,000 members yesterday. The links are on the wiki.

This event is not just for bloggers, but for anyone interested in the use of Web 2.0 in education and is subtitled "A Classroom 2.0 Meet-up." Organized on the wiki agenda by those attending, this is a day of "conversations." There are no formal presentations--just discussions that people who are attending propose and lead. Currently, about half the time slots have something in them. Last year we had people vote on the sessions to hold at the start of the day, but we've ditched that idea for this year and anyone who wants a session on any topic can set one up! This is based on feedback from last year that people wanted more and smaller discussions, so we've arbitrarily created six tracks, and can create more if we need to.

We're also going to be giving out some buttons made by Sue Waters and the Edublogs team to help make sure that those who might feel shy and need help 1) getting to know others or 2) learning to use Web 2.0 tools get the attention they deserve! When you arrive you get to pick which button best describes you. :)

We'll be broadcasting through Elluminate what takes place in the main room (so that includes Vicki Davis's Web 2.0 "Smackdown" event!). We also have some Elluminate rooms set up if anyone wants to hold virtual sessions for virtual attendees--no one has signed up to do that yet, but if anyone wants to, we'll try to make it happen--if you're nostalgic about not attending this year, we want to give you some options! As a special event this year, the director of the film Us Now will be joining us live to challenge the education community to find a way to remix or reuse the films content to create an educational version.

Whether you are there physically or virtually, EduBloggerCon is guaranteed to be a great time! We did add into the schedule an hour of socializing before the event actually begins, so be sure to come early. If you are going to attend the (physical) Wikispaces party from 6:00 - 8:00 pm at Regional Food and Drink, be sure to sign up (free) so they know how many will attend. I'll be bringing my netbook, projector, webcam, and Verizon wireless connection to the party with the hopes that those who need to attend virtually can get in on the action!

Here's to a very fun day!

The Start of an Historic Change in Communication for Educators?

2009-06-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

Date: Sat., June 20, 2009
Time: 9:00am Pacific/10:00am Mountain/11:00am Central/12:00pm Eastern
Location: in Elluminate at http://tinyurl.com/cr20live (Links to other time zones can be found at http://live.classroom20.com)

This Saturday, June 20th Kim Caise, Lorna Costantini, and Peggy George will be hosting another Classroom 2.0 LIVE show. As an extension to the Classroom 2.0 community, our "LIVE" shows are opportunities to gather with other educators in real-time events, complete with audio, chat, desktop sharing, and sometimes even video. A Google calendar of shows is available at http://live.classroom20.com/calendar.html.

The topic this Saturday is: "The BUZZ about LearnCentral" with me, Steve Hargadon as the guest speaker...:) I am the creator of the Classroom 2.0 network, and LearnCentral is a project I'm working in my new job with the online teaching and learning company Elluminate. Those who know me from my work with Ning know that I only like to work for companies that have products I really believe in, and that I only do so when I feel that I can use my position to represent the needs of educators in a way that I think will make a difference.

LearnCentral is a free social networking platform for educators that is being launched at NECC, and while still in its early stages, I believe it has the potential to help bring about historic changes in the ability for educators to communicate, collaborate, and share. It's the combination of the "asynchronous" social networking that's so great at Classroom 2.0 (and other networks) with the "synchronous" online meeting capability of Elluminate. Facebook-like in scope, we hope that it will become a place to easily:

Find other educators by their curricular interests, specialties, grade-level, or geography
Connect with them through discussion forums, groups, and one-click online meetings
Connect classrooms to other classrooms live
Create and hold webinars and online events (like Classroom 2.0 LIVE!) around any educational topic
Collect, organize, and share lesson plans, learning objects, and much more.

I see an incredible educational renaissance coming, where the excitement around collaborating with other educators that was largely accomplished by meeting at annual conferences starts to take place every day. Where a teacher can find other teachers with the same interests and passions, meet "live" in Elluminate, start sharing lesson plans, and even bring their classes into collaboration. I see a day (soon) when the individual educator, pursuing a niche topic of interest that he or she loves and that excites him or her as a learner, can be brought in as a guest speaker to a class on the other side of the world. Where anyone who cares about something in education can start a weekly or monthly meeting in Elluminate to share and brainstorm that topic. Where educational careers can be built around or supplemented as part of "Long Tail" areas of specialty focus. Last night for my Future of Education interview series we had a great panel discussion on the Future of Librarians--several of whom were (virtually) jumping up and down at the prospect of meeting online monthly to talk together. That's the kind of excitement that I'm loving about where this project can take us.

Elluminate has been a great company to work for, and they are willing to make this service free because 1) this is an historic moment and 2) being at the forefront of this opportunity should reflect very well on them and open new doors. I hope you'll come find out more and give your feedback, or explore http://www.LearnCentral.org on your own. If you're going to be at NECC, there will be a LearnCentral booth as a part of the Elluminate space in the exhibit hall, so look for me there (and at EduBloggerCon and NECCUnplugged and the Bloggers Cafe and the Open Source Pavilion and... :)

More information on tomorrow's event is at http://live.classroom20.com.

Collaborating on a Version of "Us Now" Film for Education

2009-06-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

I just got off a Google video chat (very decent quality, and picture in picture--which I really like for recording purposes) with Ivo Gormley, the director of the film Us Now which I watched for the first time last week. The film asks: "In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?" It's about how new technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organization, especially around government.

While I wished there had been a section on education, I tweeted out (rare for me!) that I wasn't sure why the film wasn't getting more attention. Ivo @-replied to me asking how they might get the film "out there more" and since then we've been brainstorming that by email and now on a live call. He's especially interested in extending the project to the education arena--what can or will education and learning be like in the new information world? Since this is what my Future of Education interview series is all about, it's a match made in heaven.

Here's our plan: Ivo is going to come in live by video to EduBloggerCon and ask us to help build a version of the film that is geared toward education. Maybe we'll screen the film during lunch for those who haven't watched it (embedded below so you can watch now if you want). Then we'll hold an unconference session with those who want to be a part of that organizing, and see what we can come up with. He and I had some fun ideas, but we want to see what ideas the community will have. It would be most fun if this were a real community undertaking!

So, if you're going to be at EduBloggerCon in DC on the 27th, hopefully you'll consider taking part in this activity. In the meantime, check it out!

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Drilling Down on the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning

2009-06-15T14:01:00.001-07:00

I'm really grateful to Knowledgeworks for helping to sponsor the Future of Education interview series the past several months. Part of the goal was to create an audience for discussing their newly-released 2020 Forecast, which is an amazing document.

This past Friday, I spent a couple of hours with Barbara Diamond, Katherine Prince, and Jesse Moyer from Knowledgeworks "drilling down" on the Forecast, which we did in Elluminate and recorded straight through. This was one of the most productive and rewarding projects I have done in a long time, and I think may become a pattern for me for future activities of this kind. The 2020 Forecast is a rich and thoughtful look at the forces that are likely to affect education over the next 10+ years, with the end goal of helping to facilitate the creation of transformative solutions for the future. That being said, the document is so densely packed with good insight that it may be daunting to open and study on one's own. Ergo, our video!

I like to think that this is the equivalent of the director's commentary on a DVD. We tried to create the same kind of experience--for you to hear stories and insights from those who helped to shape the Forecast. I've spent almost six months paying attention to this work, and I learned a lot while doing this recording. This is well-worth your time, and I hope you'll give it a listen.

Drill-down on KnowledgeWorks Foundation 2020 Forecast from Steve Hargadon on Vimeo.

Live Event: Joyce Valenza and Friends Discuss the Future of Librarians

2009-06-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

Future of Education Interview Series
Event Page at Future of Education

Date: Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed.

Joyce Valenza leads a discussion on the future of librarians and their role in education with Buffy Hamilton, Cathy Nelson, and Carolyn Foote. The actual session title is: "Is There a Place for Media Specialists Who Don't Know Social Media?"

Joyce Valenza has been the librarian at Springfield Township High School (PA) since 1998. For ten years, she was the techlife@school columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joyce is the author of Power Tools, Power Research Tools and Power Tools Recharged for ALA Editions. She currently blogs for School Library Journal. Her NeverendingSearch Blog (now on the SLJ website) won an Edublogs Award for 2005 and was nominated again in 2008. She won the AASL/Highsmith research grant in 2005. Joyce is a Milken Educator and an American Memory Fellow. Her video series, Internet Searching Skills was a YALSA Selected Video for Young Adults in 1999. The video series Library Skills for Children was released in 2003, and her six-volume video series Research Skills for Students was released in Fall 2004. Super Searchers Go to School, was published by Information Today in 2005. Her Virtual Library won the IASL School Library Web Page of the Year Award for 2001. Joyce is active in ALA, AASL, YALSA, and ISTE and contributes to Classroom Connect, VOYA, Learning and Leading with Technology, and School Library Journal. Joyce speaks nationally about issues relating to libraries and thoughtful use of educational technology. Joyce earned her doctoral degree from the University of North Texas in August, 2007.

Buffy Hamilton (http://theunquietlibrarian.wikispaces.com) is a school library media specialist at Creekview High School (The Unquiet Library) in Canton, Georgia. Hamilton, who earned her Ed.S. in Instructional Technology/School Library Media at the University of Georgia, is a seventeen year veteran. Her interests include social scholarship, participatory librarianship, connectivism, and personal learning networks for students and adults.

Cathy Nelson is a 22 year veteran educator. She is a teacher-librarian, aka school library media specialist from South Carolina. Cathy is transitioning from a middle school in the Myrtle Beach area to Dorman High School in the Spartanburg area of SC. Cathy is a member of ISTE, ALA, AASL, and the state and local affiliates of those organizations. She particpates in many online forums and nings as well, and strives to evangalize student engagement and making learning relevant through the tools students love. Being in the school media center is the perfect place to make a difference with students and teachers alike.

Carolyn Foote, a high school and district librarian at Westlake High School in Austin, TX, had a small feature in School Library Journal, October 2007, as well as an article on Skype in the January 2008 and was included in the article, “Mattering in the School Blogosphere” in American Libraries Magazine in May 2007. Having recently redesigned a library, she is fascinated by the future of physical libraries and their services. Her blog can be found at www.futura.edublogs.org.

The Elluminate room (http://tinyurl.com/futureofed) will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.

Many thanks to KnowledgeWorks Foundation and Elluminate for their support for the Future of Education interview series.

Live Event: Panel Discussion on The Future of Books and Reading

2009-06-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

Future of Education Interview Series
Event Page

Date: Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed.

There are dramatic changes taking place that seem likely to change our experiences with books and reading. They include: pre-publication "wikified" collaboration, electronic delivery, open licensing, increased author-reader and reader-reader conversation, shared annotations, and more. Join this amazing panel as we peer into the near and long-term future of the reading experience.

Will Richardson is known internationally for his work with educators and students to understand and implement instructional technologies and, more specifically, the tools of the Read/Write Web into their schools, classrooms and communities. A public school educator for 22 years, Will’s own Weblog (Weblogg-ed.com) is a primary resource for the creation and implementation of Weblog technologies on the K-12 level and is a leading voice for school reform in the context of the fundamental changes these new technologies are bringing to all aspects of life. His critically acclaimed, best-selling book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Tools for Classrooms (March 2006, Corwin Press) is already being used by thousands of teachers to reinvent their practice, and his keynotes, presentations and workshops to audiences around the world communicate a fresh and inspiring vision of what schools can and must become. He is a founding partner of the Connective Learning Group which is dedicated to assisting educators contextualize and implement Read/Write Web tools into their schools and classrooms.

Bob Burg is a highly sought-after speaker at corporate, financial services and direct sales conventions. His critically acclaimed book, Endless Referrals: Network Your Everyday Contacts Into Sales has sold over 200,000 copies and continues to be used as a training manual for top sales organizations throughout the world. His latest national bestseller (and one of Steve's favorite books), The Go-Giver has been heralded as a new business classic. It’s been translated into 14 languages and has already topped the 100,000 mark.

Travis Alber is the co-founder of BookGlutton.com. Her day-to-day role has been Chief Creative Officer, creating the look and feel for the website and the Unbound Reader, and managing marketing and communications. Prior to founding BookGlutton.com Travis was a creative director at JLOOP.com. She has eleven years of on-line experience, and has worked in web design, advertising, online training and education. Her client history includes: Cisco, Sprint,
Playstation, Wells Fargo, Macys, Midway Games and Dodge. In addition, Travis has won a number of awards for her interactive art, and has been recognized by Drunken Boat, The Flash Forward Film Festival, and the Electronic Literature Organization. She has a Masters Degree in Interactive Multimedia.

Aaron Miller is the co-founder of BookGlutton.com. His role is Chief Technical Officer, where he manages the architecture and development of the Unbound Reader, Catalog, website, and all widgets and APIs. He has eleven years experience working on-line; professionally he’s worked on both the creative and technical sides of projects—working at times as a writer and designer and at others a developer in San Francisco and LA. His clients include Wells Fargo, Organic, and Driving Media. Aaron has a Master’s Degree in Interactive Multimedia and an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine.

Maggie Tsai is the Chief Diigo Ambassador and Co-founder of Diigo. Diigo provides a powerful online research and collaborative research tool that integrates tags and folders, highlighting, clipping and sticky notes, and group-based collaboration, enabling a whole new process of online information management.

Links:
Wall Street Journal: How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
Wired Magazine: Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World
Will Richardson: New Reading, New Writing

The Elluminate room (http://tinyurl.com/futureofed) will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.

Live Event: Frontline's "Digital Nation" Project with Producer/Director Rachel Dretzin

2009-06-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

Future of Education Interview Series
http://www.futureofeducation.com

Date: Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Time: 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 3pm GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed.

Join us as we talk with producer/director Rachel Dretzin about PBS FRONTINE’s “Digital Nation” project, and specifically what the educational community can do to be a part of it.

“Digital Nation” is a multiplatform documentary initiative that explores how the Web and digital media are impacting the way we think, learn and interact. The project will unfold through a series of online video reports and user-submitted stories that will springboard into a documentary to air winter 2010. Topics will include education and technology, human development, online privacy, virtual worlds and online games, technology in the military, digital media in the workplace and more.

Central to the “Digital Nation” is a mosaic of user-generated videos, audio, photos, comments and posts that contribute to “Digital Nation” reports. As part of their chapter on educational technology, “Education in the Digital Age,” FRONTLINE and the “Digital Nation” team are asking educators to collaborate on this unfolding chapter on education by submitting stories and comments on how technology impacts their classrooms, their work and their lives.

An award-winning journalist, Rachel has been producing documentaries for FRONTLINE since the mid-1990s. She and her husband, filmmaker Barak Goodman, are joint partners in Ark Media, a documentary production company based in Brooklyn, New York. Together, they have produced and directed numerous documentaries for FRONTLINE, including: The Lost Children of Rockdale County (1999) winner of the George Foster Peabody Award; the three-part series Failure to Protect (2003), winner of the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize; Merchants of Cool (2001); The Persuaders (2004); and A Hidden Life (2006). Independently, Rachel's films for FRONTLINE include Hillary's Class (1994); Betting on the Market (1997); The High Price of Health (1998); The Search for Satan (1995) and Growing Up Online (2008). She has also produced for WNET New York, NPR's All Things Considered, MSNBC's Edgewise and most recently, a short film for The New York Times Magazine on the Web. She and Goodman have three children, ages 11, 8 and 6.

Link: Digital Nation Project Website

Link: Future of Education event page and discussion

The Elluminate room (http://tinyurl.com/futureofed) will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.

Many thanks to KnowledgeWorks Foundation and Elluminate for their support for the Future of Education interview series.

Connecting Classrooms to Classrooms Worldwide

2009-05-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

I'm holding a special online meeting on Monday, June 1st, to work out the details of building resources that can help educators easily connect classrooms of students together from around the world-especially using Elluminate's audio/video/more environment for communicating and collaborating. One of my jobs for Elluminate is to help facilitate free and easy communication of this sort through the new LearnCentral network I'm helping to build. If you're available Monday at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (Tuesday) GMT please come to this "LearnCentral Pioneers" meeting with advice or ideas on how to best do this.

Here are some examples of questions I want to ask: Where do you go now to find other willing classes? What kind of training would you like to help you to do this? What are the best examples of this kind of world-wide classroom-to-classroom collaboration?

Join on Monday by going directly to the Elluminate room at http://tinyurl.com/lcpioneers or logging into LearnCentral.org and clicking on the event link at the bottom of the "Community" page.

Speed Demo Bonuses: Dropbox & Picnik

2009-05-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

At the Sacramento Classroom 2.0 workshop a couple of weeks ago during our "speed demos" session, one of the participants showed a program called DropBox. It's turned out to be an amazingly helpful tool for me.

Dropbox creates a folder on your computer that automatically backs up all data put in it (2GB for free) to their backup server in a password-protected account for you. It also allows you to put a parallel folder other computers you use, syncing those folders among your computers and the "cloud." That means that every computer I use (and that's actually four--which amazes me) has the full folder with all the files, and dragging a file into or out of a particular computer's folder mirrors the change on the my Dropbox folders on the other computers and in my web storage "locker."

I'm not exaggerating if I say it's saved me a TON of time and work, since I now always have access to all my graphic, logo, and doc files no matter which computer I'm on, and that everything is accessible and backed up on the web.

If you sign up using this link, you increase your and my 2GB free quota by 250MB: https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTEwNDQ5MDg5

Another program that I'm using almost daily--and which I'm now demoing with some regularity at the workshops--is Picnik, the web-based photo editing program that crops, resizes, and more without even registering. While I've bought the full-featured version (my kids love the high-end effects features), I often don't even log in since it's not required for many of the fast graphic editing I need to do. I just make the changes and save the file to my Dropbox folder! :)

Have fun!

Next Wednesday - Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Through Innovative Technology

2009-05-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, May 20th, the National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI) will host an interactive webinar entitled "Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Through Innovative Technology."

Since this event includes me as a guest speaker, I'll quote from their press release:

"Technology is transforming how students learn and engage in our information society. Learn about forward-thinking technology solutions from three leading educational entrepreneurs who have unleashed student talent through the use of online, interactive platforms. Join Steve Hargadon, Founder of Classroom 2.0; Paul Kim, Chief Technology Officer for Stanford University School of Education and a leading researcher for Programmable Open Mobile Internet; and Jennifer Correiro, Executive Director of TakingITGlobal, as they discuss successful strategies for developing the entrepreneurial spirit of global youth in advancing social media and innovation."

The Webinar will take place on May 20th from 3:00 pm - 4:15 pm ET. To register for this free Webinar, visit the National Center for Technology Innovation Web site: http://www.nationaltechcenter.org/index.php/2009/04/20/developing-tomorrows-leaders-through-innovative-technology-free-webinar/

I hope you'll consider joining us!

EduBloggerCon 2009/DC and NECC "Unplugged" - On-site or Virtually

2009-05-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

The wiki pages for EduBloggerCon 2009/DC and NECC "Unplugged" are both "live" as of this week, and have--I think--turned out great. Please visit them and consider being a part of these fun (and free) events.

EDUBLOGGERCON / CLASSROOM 2.0 "Meet-up": This is an international all-day "meetup" of educational bloggers and those using social media and collaborative technologies in education, held on the Saturday (June 27th) before the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in the same venue (thanks, ISTE!). All are welcome--whether you yourself blog, are just an educational blog reader, or even just want to hang out with an interesting group of people. This event is based on the idea of an "unconference", and is being organized by the participants in real time on the wiki and later on-site. There are no formal presentations, just "conversations" that you want to facilitate. Get different-sized "I'm Attending" web badges on the site.

Big Announcement: You'll notice that we now have "virtual tracks" for those who cannot attend EduBloggerCon physically but want to participate remotely (thanks to Elluminate). You can even organize your own small or large EduBloggerCon physical "meet-up" in another city! More online...

Links:

Main Page - http://www.edubloggercon.com/EduBloggerCon+2009

Who's Attending - http://www.classroom20.com/events/edubloggercon-2009-classroom

NECC UNPLUGGED: Held during and as a part of NECC on June 28th - July 1, NECC "Unplugged" is three days of 30-minute presentations where anyone can sign up to present, either on-site or virtually--held on-site in it's own "lounge" area and hosted virtually in Elluminate . Always wanted to present at NECC but weren't selected? Or have a topic to present or discuss that wasn't timely when formal presentation applications were due last year but is so now? Sign yourself up! (And then put the web badge somewhere for folks to see it).

NECC Unplugged will stream all its sessions (on-site and virtual) live through Elluminate. We'll also be absorbing the functions that the NECCLive.com wiki performed last year: anyone streaming, liveblogging, back-channel chatting, Tweeting, or otherwise generating content for remote users can list those resources here in right-most column.

Link:

NECC Unplugged - http://www.neccunplugged.com/

Here's to an ever-expanding and great NECC experience this year!

Three Great Remote (and Free!) Ed Tech Events This Weekend

2009-04-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

Three great events are taking place this weekend that you can participate in remotely! All are being held through Classroom 2.0's Elluminate account, and links are below.

1. PodStock, this Friday and Saturday (May 1 & 2). This is the brainchild of the ever-amazing Kevin Honeycutt. Podstock is a brand new conference designed to bring podcast creators and those who see the real value of podcasting as creators and consumers together. The physical conference is in Old Town Wichita, Kansas, but one whole track of the conference is being live-streamed through Classroom 2.0's Elluminate account. The event schedule for Friday is at http://www.essdack.org/podstock/?q=day1, and the event schedule for Saturday is at http://www.essdack.org/podstock/?q=day1. The Elluminate link that you use to attend for both days is https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2008350&password=M.1A526C55FBD94161034848F86F2735. Wichita is Central Daylight Time, so take that into account when looking at their program.

ADDED: Jerry Butler just sent this message: "Join us at Podstock virtually if you can't be there in person! Thanks to Steve Hargadon and learncentral.org, we will be sharing sessions on Elluminate. Go to http://tinyurl.com/Podstock starting at 9:15 Central Time and log on to join the fun. I will be running the back channel conversations and helping you join the educational movement. It's two days of Education, Learning and Fun and you won't want to miss it! Also, join us for our simultaneous RL/SL dance party at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/KDS%20World/17/155/21 Starting at 5:00 SLT (Pacific) 7:00 Central.

2. MIT's New Media Literacies Spring Conference, this Saturday (May 2). This one-day event, "Learning in a Participatory Culture," is being held physically in Boston and is also being streamcast in its entirety (all tracks!). Because there are different Elluminate links for each track, you'll need to use this detailed schedule to click through to individual sessions. Boston is Eastern Daylight Time, so take that into account when looking at the program.

3. Our regular Classroom 2.0 "LIVE" Saturday show (May 2). 9am PDT / 12pm EDT. Our topic this week is "Managing Social Networks" with special guest, Angelia Maiers - author of the book, Classroom Habitudes. Please join for some great information and tips about managing social networks and the concept 'Inbox Zero'. More information and session details are at http://live.classroom20.com. The direct Elluminate link is http://tinyurl.com/d7hvx7.

It should be a very exciting weekend for learning remotely! :) Hope you have some fun!

Creating the Future of Learning - KnowledgeWorks Foundation's 2020 Forecast & Interview

2009-04-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we have a special event in the Future of Education interview series: an interview with Chad Wick and Andrea Saveri on "KnowledgeWorks Foundation's 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning."

KnowledgeWorks Foundation is the primary sponsor of the Future of Education interview series, and they deserve a huge round of applause. We've had a terrific lineup so far, and have some great interviews coming up (Michael Horn, Chris Dede, Michael Wesch, John Seely Brown, David Thornburg, and more!). The interviews are live through Elluminate, but are also are recorded and available to listen or watch at any time.

Tomorrow, April 21st, KnowledgeWorks Foundation President and CEO Chad Wick and futurist Andrea Saveri will join us to explore key forces of change that will shape the landscape of learning over the next decade, and how we are moving toward a culture of creation and innovation. We'll dive into the 2020 Forecast and accompanying website experience for an hour, including a Q&A period.

Date: Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Time: 12:30pm Pacific / 3:30pm Eastern / 7:30pm GMT (international times here)

Location: In Elluminate. Log in at https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.969B8EF566D3702FEAB416B57827B4. The Elluminate room will be open up 15 minutes before the event if you want to come in early.

To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support.

Chad Wick is driven by a desire to create equity of educational opportunity in order to effectively prepare all students for college, work, and citizenship in the 21st century. Recognized by former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley as "one of the outstanding education leaders in the country," Chad leads KnowledgeWorks Foundation in its mission to increase the number and diversity of people who value and access public education. As the founding president and CEO, he has led the Foundation to achieve this mission by providing not only seed grants and operating funds, extensive technical assistance and training, but policy and advocacy projects that promote and support sustainable, system-wide changes.

Prior to starting her own independent practice, Andrea Saveri worked for Institute for the Future, a non-profit think tank in Palo Alto. As a research director, her career at IFTF included leading large-scale domestic and international research studies in technology adoption, social innovation, and networked organizational structures. At IFTF she launched FutureCommons, an open networked thinking community, and initiated IFTF's transition to a networked organizational model, applying her research to IFTF's strategic plan. She pioneered IFTF's work with teens, developing curriculum to teach youth about forecasting and long-term thinking. Over the years she has presented research and facilitated numerous client meetings from the managerial and operational levels to the executive and board levels.

Created with the Institute for the Future, the 2020 Forecast highlights key forces of change that will shape learning over the next decade. In particular, it shows how creation and innovation are becoming more essential for success than ever before.

To be successful in tomorrow's new economy, today's students will have to be able to learn and adapt quickly and frequently.

In highlighting such trends, the 2020 Forecast aims to help anyone with a stake in learning anticipate and prepare for change.

Having been engaged in a disciplined study of future forces affecting education since 2006, KnowledgeWorks is working to transform education in the US from a world of schooling to a world of learning.

This world calls not for better schools, but for entirely new kinds of learning environments.

To be successful in it, tomorrow's learners will not just need better teachers; they will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles.

KnowledgeWorks invites educators and others interested in the future of learning to use the 2020 Forecast to support visioning and strategic planning. Anyone can start exploring by visiting www.futureofed.org.

The Rapid Building of a Website Using Social Media Tools

2009-04-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

This past week, with limited time, I've built the website EdStimulus.org. Whatever your view is of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), it is important that the disbursed funds are spent on programs that deliver good long-term results. The goal of the site is to provide information and access to events, resources, and discussion areas relating to the educational portion of the the funds--and hopefully to help facilitate a dialog that will promote that good decision-making.

While the site is assuredly simple, I think it serves as a potential example for those interested in the use of Web 2.0 and collaborative Web technologies to help promote dialog by rapidly building topic-specific websites using social media tools. What follows is a description of how EdStimulus.org has been constructed. I am amazed at the significant abilities currently available with free and low-cost tools to coalesce resources and discussion around specific topics. Hopefully this information is interesting to some.

The site was created using the Web-based site creation program Weebly. Great for fast website prototyping, the program is free to use with some small advertising for their company in the footer, or in a very inexpensive upgraded form without the advertising and with some additional features. In either version, you are able to associate a domain name with the site for free. For student portfolio projects, this site is an undiscovered gem.

The "Home" tab includes some widgets, one of this is a Twitter box. I created a Twitter account for his project (http://www.twitter.com/edstimulus), and then I propose here the use of the specific tag "#edstimulus" to allow easy following and searching of posts in Twitter on the educational stimulus discussion. On my own Netvibes page, where I track many Twitter search phrases and can also post to my multiple Twitter accounts from one place, I added a widget to now track this code.

The "Events" tab uses an embedded Google calendar form to display upcoming events. Anyone with permission to access to this calendar can add events which will show up automatically on the site. The ability to request to hold an event is through Weebly's pre-structured integration with HourTown. This could also easily be accomplished with a Google form.

The "Discuss" tab also utilizes a pre-configured integration Weebly has established, this time with Nabble. While it's not necessarily our long-term plan to host conversation on this site, the features of Nabble are very impressive. Set up was easy, but the featureset is robust enough that I haven't even fully looked at all the options. I will certainly do so if there is enough dialog to warrant the attention. :)

The "Links" tab draws RSS feeds through standard Weebly elements placed on the page, with the feeds coming from the social bookmarking tool Diigo's "enhanced linkrolls" tool. While the bookmarking feature is just one part of Diigo's amazing repertoire, it's a very effective way to maintain a dynamic link list on a website with very little work. I've set up a news alert from Google on the phrase "education stimulus" to come to me once a day, and any relevant sites I find I can "bookmark" by right-clicking in my Firefox web browser and adding the appropriate description and tags (this requires loading the Diigo add-on for Firefox, which is easy). Depending on the tags I use, these items show up immediately in the lists on the website.

The "News" tab first takes an RSS feed from searching Twitter (http://search.twitter.com) for "edstimulus" and displays that. Then I've taken the same Google news alert RSS feed and placed it in an RSS element box on the page.

"Voices" is our blog tab. The blog is a Blogger blog at http://blog.edstimulus.org, so we link to that but there is also RSS feed element using the blog's feed to show the postings in reverse chronological order on the page. Clicking on one of them opens a new tab or window and takes you to that specific post.

The "Archive" tab also utilizes the same Diigo features, just drawing from a different tag set.

Any other ideas most welcome! One unique aspect of the site is that it allows you to schedule and hold, for free, live public web events using the Elluminate.com platform, which is a direct benefit of my working for Elluminate now. We've also been soliciting partner organizations to help provide events, information, promotion, or staff-time support for EdStimulus.org. The site is for informational purposes and the only financial interest associated with this project at this point is Elluminate allowing a portion of my time to work on it.

U.S. Educational Stimulus Aid and EdStimulus.org - Feedback?

2009-04-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

I could use some feedback for a simple website I've built around the idea of helping promote good long-term decision-making with the educational stimulus funds. The idea is fairly simple, but has a "subtext" as well: to also help show administrators the value of Web 2.0 and social media by giving them some direct experience with benefits in a very practical area.

EdStimulus.org has the following components:

1. A Twitter feed for announcements (especially of events).
2. A public calendar of any events I see, both free and paid, around the educational stimulus package (taken from a Google calendar and updated automatically).
3. A way for anyone to apply to hold their own Elluminate sessions (for free) on this topic. I can do this because of my work for Elluminate, and their interest in having the Elluminate platform make a difference (and be visible) in this larger discussion. Will people find a use for this? Are there folks who will be interested in hold a free webinars/discussions on using the stimulus funds wisely?
4. A prototype discussion forum. I really need help understanding this--which is: what kind of discussions are decision-makers going to want to have, and will they want the confidentiality of a private network in order to feel free to talk about this topic?
5. A links page to other resources (that draws, if anyone is interested, from my Diigo social bookmarking account).
6. A news page with a feed from Google News based on the phrase "educational stimulus."
7. An archive page for links to recordings of past events.

I'm a little fascinated by the ability that our current social media landscape gives me to relatively easily create and update a resource site like this around a specific topic. But I don't think the site will make much of a difference if I don't get some help in refining the idea and growing it beyond my initial brainstorm.

Here's where I think I could use some help:

1. Are there features that could be included in the site that I haven't thought of? (For instance, since a portion of the funds will be given out based on grant applications, would it help to have a blog specifically on that topic as a part of the site?)
2. If the site is truly useful, and if so, how do we get the word out to administrators and decision-makers?
3. Is there anyone dying to help with this? I'm figuring it would help to have some others who can track events, bookmark resources, give information webinars, and facilitate panel discussions or group meetings.

Thanks for your attention. Please feel free to respond here, to email me directly at steve@hargadon.com, or to add your thoughts at a discussion post on Future of Education.

Blowing the Doors off NECC 2009

2009-04-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

One of the most enjoyable ed tech events of the year is the National Educational Computing Conference each summer. This year it's in Washington, DC from June 28 - July 1st. Tomorrow, as part of our regular Classroom 2.0 LIVE show, we're going to talk about blowing the doors off of the regular conference experience, both for those physically attending and for those who can only participate remotely.

This meeting should be a lot of fun. I have what I think are some really fun ideas, and Wes Fryer is going to help me moderate a brainstorming session so we can get planning going. (We're going to be looking for volunteers to help!) Because of my work at Elluminate, we also have unlimited access to their services, which should allow a lot of remote participation!

Here are some things we will discuss:

EduBloggerCon. Not just for bloggers, but for EVERYONE interested in Web 2.0 in education, our one-day, Saturday (June 27th) unconference event will be our THIRD at NECC, and let's make sure it's the best ever. Based on feedback from last year, we need to make sure there's a lot of self-organization and socializing allowed. I have this crazy idea to encourage people who can't attend NECC to hold their own concurrent online sessions and tap into the larger event. I can even imagine smaller locally-organized groups of even two or three people possibly getting together in their local areas if we set up a wiki page for this.

NECC Unplugged and NECC Live. I want to consider merging these two projects into one. NECC Unplugged is our special program for anyone to sign up to present at NECC in our special lounge area, which (hopefully!) this year will be separate from but adjacent to the Blogger's Cafe so that we don't have too much going on at once. Didn't get accepted to present, or have a topic that's come up recently? You'll be able to sign up for a time slot, and we're going to live-stream the whole thing through Elluminate! NECC Live was a wiki last year listing all streaming/blogging going on at NECC, and I want to propose that this be merged with NECC Unplugged into one site.

Twitter & Live-Blogging: we can talk about the best ways to utilize Twitter, and if there's any value in agreeing on hash-tags, platforms, or anything else.

If I've missed anything, please come to our session tomorrow and particpate!

Time: 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern / 5pm GMT

Location: Classroom 2.0 LIVE Elluminate room: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2008350&password=M.6D19ABFD7D70B03081A7A8D3632F21

First time using Elluminate? Go to http://www.elluminate.com/support to make sure your computer is set up to use.

LearnCentral Beta Invitation & Feedback Meeting

2009-03-25T11:48:00.001-07:00

As I described a little over a month ago, I've been working on a project with Elluminate that I think has the potential to be truly "historic." Really. And we're taking the wraps off of it now and I want to invite you, kind reader, to the early public preview of LearnCentral.org.

Now, as I say in the intro video below, this is kind of like bringing someone to see a house or building that is still under construction... We know there are going to be some "unfinished rooms" and that the paint isn't dry or even up in other areas, but we really are hoping that you will come and let us know what work still needs to be done that we might have missed.

LearnCentral.org is like a Facebook for educators, in that it allows you to specify the details of your teaching or curricular interests and then find others with whom you could collaborate. But it is much more than that, which is what makes this such a fun project. LearnCentral will also have a robust content-sharing repository for learning objects and lesson plans, full-featured discussions forums, and public and private groups. As well, because this is an Elluminate project, you will have one-button access to meeting with someone else online through Elluminate's free and full-featured vRoom program. (I'm particularly excited about what this might do for allowing parent-teacher conferences to take place in more convenient ways!)

And while we haven't worked out all of the logistical details yet, here's the part that really gets me jumping up and down: we're going to make it possible for educators to hold larger group meetings (like our Classroom 2.0 LIVE! meetings) for free. There will be some basic stipulations for doing this: the meetings have to be available to the general public, free (not being charged for), and recorded for the LearnCentral archive. What we think this will do is to extend the incredible professional development that is now taking place asynchronously in social networking and add the synchronous piece. Want to gather together and brainstorm with educators around the world who teach in your field? You'll be able to do it. Want to hold monthly meetings to share lesson ideas? You'll be able to do it.

For me, this holds incredible potential as part of the long-tail concept. Not the part we normally think about--student access to a much broader variety of material--but the part where educators can gather around their special curricular interests that may be unique or alone in their local school or district, but not alone when the whole world becomes the pool of potential colleagues for regular interaction. Like Jim Beeghley, who's specialty is using technology to teach the Civil War. Or the ladies in Hawaii who are starting the Hawaii 2-0 meetings around the use of Web 2.0 in schools there. Or anyone else who doesn't have the budget to travel to larger conferences to make these kind of connections and then follow up on them (which may be most of us in the current economy!)

I hope you'll join the public beta and let me know what you think. As soon as you do, you'll see that I'm automatically added as a colleague. I'll look forward to hearing your reactions and feedback. I've scheduled what I hope will be the first of weekly (?) feedback meetings for this coming Monday, March 30th, at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12midnight GMT in Elluminate at https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.6B8E896955C97D9166E113CE9A3688. If you haven't used Elluminate before, don't be shy about attending--we do a lot of hand-holding so beginners feel welcome! You can test your machine's configuration for Elluminate at http://www.elluminate.com/support.

Here's the new intro video which will soon be on the site.

Twitter for Conference Back-Channel Chat

2009-03-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

In the all-day symposium on Web 2.0 this past Tuesday at the always thought-provoking CoSN.org annual conference, I was lamenting the degree to which the format of the event didn't actually reflect the participative nature of the topic. Wondering how I was going to stay alert with only four hours of sleep the night before (flight delays), I decided to see how it would be to take my conference notes in Twitter as a form of live-blogging.

Like many others, I have had a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I find I am appreciating it more and more as the tool is being shaped by good uses, and I'd recently determined that keeping multiple Twitter accounts for different kinds of communication purposes is a "good use" practice for me. I use a NetVibes page with widgets for each of the accounts I have, and when I need to make an announcement in any one, I can do it directly from my one Netvibes page without having to log specifically into a particular Twitter account. Since I thought it would be hard on those following me to receive a live-blogging stream in my regular account, I created an new account just for conference tweeting at shconferences. It felt a little brilliant at the time, I have to admit, although I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this.

In each tweet I used the #cosn09 hash tag that would allow others to follow not just my particular conference tweets but any others from the conference with the same tag at search.twitter.com. I also tried to include the speaker's last name in each tweet so that it was clear I was quoting them (I put my own few comments in parentheses). It was fairly easy to type their name and the tag once, ctrl-c copy it, and then just paste it in before each message. By the end of the conference, there were 38 followers of this new account, and I'd sent out 430 tweets (so for any of my regular followers I think this was a good idea!). I kept one browser page open to my shconferences Twitter account, and one page open to the Twitter search for #cosn09 (which does a great job of updating the feed and letting you know how many new tweets have come in.)

Having allowed others to follow the "thought-bites" of the conference sessions I was in, the task now that the conference is over has been to turn those public notes into a document that would be useful to me to review and for future reference. My goal has been to put them into regular chronological order (not the reverse order--most recent first--that they now appear in the feeds or pages from Twitter), then automate the process of getting them into a Google document. I've gotten pretty close, but still have a step I need help with.

First I got the RSS feed from an advanced Twitter search for "#cosn09" from shconference. Jim Klein helped to find the API parameter notes for Twitter, so that we could pull more than just the most recent dozen posts into an RSS feed, and it turns out that we can get 100 at a time and then use a "page" parameter to go through all of them. Twitter's help page indicates that you can't go back more than four months, so all of this would have to be done fairly soon after the actual event. I also used the parameter to take out the user information since it's just my own notes. My RSS feed ends up looking like this:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+"%23cosn09"+from:shconferences&rpp=100&page=1

And I have five feeds, with the page number incrementing to 5 in order to cover all the posts. I finally spent a few minutes (much less time than I thought it would take) to learn how to use Yahoo's Pipes to aggregate the five feeds and put them into ascending date order (the opposite of the Twitter feed). Here is the link to the "Pipe:"

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ykLPXRIQ3hGf_dM1BRNMsA

This is terrific, and it's so darn close I can taste it... But when I try to bring this feed into any document converter (RSS2PDF or xFruits) I have a 60+ page document, and each tweet is duplicated both as title and content. I've tried to use the "sub-element" function in Pipes to just get one field or the other, but for some reason that doesn't work (help?!).

I am hoping someone else can pick up this ball and run just a bit further with it. For me, this was much better for back-channel chatting at the conference than my experiences with Chatzy and CoverItLive--not because the technology is any bettter (it's arguably worse), but because Twitter has become so ubiquitous that we didn't have to spend any time trying to figure out what tool was going to be used and who was going to set it up. And that's usually so hard to do at a conference that you end up with more than one and it's just a hassle... The potential downside to my using Twitter this way is that if you had even a few people being as prolific as I was, I'm thinking you'd maybe want to have session tags, and then we're back to the whole "organizing" dilemma. I guess it will be interesting to see how valuable such a backchannel would be with a lot more content.

Palm Springs: EduBloggerCon West and the Classroom 2.0 Meetup

2009-02-26T14:37:00.000-08:00

Next week is the always-exciting CUE.org annual conference in Palm Springs. So, of course, it's also time for EduBloggerCon "West," Wednesday, March 4th, which now combines with the Classroom 2.0 Workshops series to provide for a really terrific day of meeting, discussing, and sharing in EduBloggerCon style. The event is free (thanks to CUE), but you do not need to be attending CUE to participate. Both beginners and experts will have a great time.

We meet at the Palm Springs Convention Center, Mesquite F at 12:00 noon and will map out the topics and ideas around Web 2.0 and education that we want to drill down on. If you haven't done this before, you might be wondering how you can organize a conference on the fly--don't worry, it's an exciting process and leads to some really great sessions and discussions. You can see the agenda page we will us for organizing at http://www.edubloggercon.com/Cue2009Agenda, and you can sign up (not required but fun to let people know you are coming) at http://www.edubloggercon.com/cue2009attending or at http://www.classroom20.com/events/edubloggercon-west-classroom. Bring your laptop if you have one!

Pretty much guaranteed topics will include:

What is Web 2.0? (Begginer Session)
Blogs and Blogging
Wikis
Social Networking in Education (or the politically more appealing: 21st Century Learning Environments) - Beginning and Advanced
RSS and Readers
Twitter
Video Streaming
Social Bookmarking
Online Meetings
Google Everything
Podcasting

There is also big news today: Mike Lawrence of CUE has offered to let us use the Wynham Presidential Suite (5th floor, overlooking the pool!) to extend our meeting (for those who want) into the evening. Mark Wagner has suggested that we might do some kind of pot-luck or bring snacks. I've changed the time for EBC West above to having us finish at 9pm -- we have to be out for sure by 9:30 when Mike will get back.

I'll be using my Eluminate Live! meeting room to broadcast the whole of EduBloggerCon this time, so if you can't make it in person, feel free to watch (and participate) at https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.449193AC6826A3D080C3E4E087804F

Hope to see you there or online!

[Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandytri/405993099/sizes/s/ There is often snow visible this time of year in Palm Springs!]

Adult Educators Followup

2009-02-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I spoke to a group of adult educators at the "Technology and Distance Learning Symposium" held by the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network (OTAN) in Sacramento, California. Because the time was tight, and because I didn't do a great job of tightening up my talk, we didn't get all the way through my usual "Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education" points! So I promised to post some links with the additional information, which are below.

Luckily, they had scheduled me during the next hour in an informal discussion format, which allowed me to finish the material for those who were there, and to have a great discussion about social media, learning, and especially, the needs of educators who work with adults. I was also struck by just how ubiquitous Facebook is becoming, and how much it is opening the door to some understanding by the general public about the value of social media. (It's playing a role not unlike Wikipedia has played for Open Source, where familiarity starts to encouragae understanding.)

Links: