Suddenly it was November and I was home with my kid. It was a Saturday afternoon and the tweet feed exploded. Suddenly all my friends were talking about this phenomenal conference in Phoenix, and I was jealous. Why wasn’t I there? By dinner time I was itching to get out of the house, and people began to converge on Chino Bandido’s in Chandler. I told the wife to watch the kid, I was going out. I got there, checked in on Brightkite (as I do anytime I go anywhere) and waited for my few friends to show up. Suddenly my phone began to beep. Other people were checking in. People came into the restaurant in droves. They looked like me. Acted like me. I didn’t know them.

Suddenly what I thought was a small geek community in Phoenix was much much larger. I also realized that this PodCampAZ thing was for real, and I was missing it.

By Sunday morning I was at PodCampAZ, in my new, cool t-shirt and ready to rock ‘n roll. I spent a great day with all of these people, and quickly registered for PodCampAZ 2009. Next up was the call for presenters. What did I want to say? I had to say something? Why just sit there and not share? Something. Anything.
I found new ways this year to contact parents and communicate through the high school community as a teacher who is obsessed with technology, but as a parent I knew too few teachers thought like I did. Therefore, my market was both. Here’s Devon the teacher. Here’s Devon the parent. Which are you? Come find out. My proposal was accepted and I even get to present on my birthday! Woohoo! I am ok with that, since I’ve done it before in a former life.

So here are the basics for the conference, and I hope you can join us. It’s free. The only pre-req is to have fun, and if you have something to say, well then say it. I will see you there. Come say hello.

PodCampAZ is at the University of Advancing Technology on Baseline Road (just past Fry’s Electronics for all of us geeks out there). It’s next week November 14 & 15 (wow, I will be 35. Odd.) Some of the people will include YOU (yeah, you). … and New media innovators, enthusiasts, participants, and newbies who are interested the role of the internet in interactive communication. It really is two crazy cool days of learning, sharing, and people meeting. And Phoenix metro is gorgeous in November. An the coolest part is, it’s free!!! Totally free. But you could buy a t-shirt and support @podcampaz for years to come.

So here’s the skinny from my buddies around the valley who wrote the media kit for this event:

It’s that time of year again – PodCamp AZ is coming to the University of Advancing Technology November 14th and 15th! PodCampAZ is a FREE networking media unconference, dedicated to blogging, video blogging, podcasting, social networking, and all other relevant media. At the heart of the unconference is the opportunity to have a conversation at large with those innovators which have created a successful blend of relevant media and put it to work for them. Speakers will address emerging trends and best practices on everything from print and radio to mobile, interactive web, and in real life information exchange. During PodCamp sessions, attendees are free to drop in, listen and learn about what is relevant to their needs, and if they choose to, move on to other sessions. You can also become an interactive part of the experience by sharing your knowledge as a speaker or stimulating ideas and asking questions as an active attendee.

If you are an established or aspiring blogger, podcaster, video blogger, or social media advocote and want to meet hundreds of people with the same interests, head over to podcampaz.org to get more information about this exciting event. And above all else, register to attend PodCamp AZ!

Other Links and Topics
If you want to go beyond the basic information, there are several areas that we currently focused on developing. We’d love you forever if you picked one or two to highlight in your article/cast to help us spread the word.

• Sponsorship – We are actively seeking sponsors for everything from rooms to metals to after-parties. Find information about sponsor levels and contact Paul Valach sponsors@podcampaz.org.
• Speakers – We have an awesome speaker lineup already, and are still taking submissions, but only through Saturday. The schedule gets published Monday! If you have questions, contact Sheila Dee and Lawrence Riddick at greenroom@podcampaz.org.
• PodCast AZ – Every year we have live podcasting throughout the entire session. Contact Dani Cutler and Dan and CJ Feierabend at onair@podcampaz.org to get on the airwaves.
• Volunteers – We’ll need a small army of people to help on event days. We might even have some cool swag for you, like a t-shirt and other unidentified stuff. If you want to march in our army, contact Crystal O’Hara at volunteer@podcampaz.org.
• Tees – We have 600 t-shirts to give to registered attendees, and over 500 people are already registered. If you want in on the goodness, get registered.
• This year, there will also be a monitored Help Desk area to handle your issues as they arise.

Registration
Registration is open. Please make sure you link to the registration page. The event is free to attend, but not free to put together, so we have a pre-registration and donation option.

Graphics
For all your official PCAZ 2009 graphics desires, see our digital swag.

And one two last things…

1. We’ve created an awesome overlay for your Twitter avatar. Add it, or we’ll sic Chuck’s Chihuahua on you!
2. We’ve got Facebook flair to flair your profile and send to friends. (Include images on blog post.)

   http://apps.facebook.com/getflair/viewflair.php?id=11386354&ts=profmain
   http://apps.facebook.com/getflair/viewflair.php?id=11385790&ts=profmain
   http://apps.facebook.com/getflair/viewflair.php?id=11386354&ts=profmain

So will I see you there????

My friend and colleague Shelley Rodrigo recently published the 2009 MLA updated The Wadsworth Guide to Research with Susan Cochran-Miller. In that book she covers the big three at length: APA, MLA, and CSE. But the strong thing they did was begin to make these styles relevant. The citations are for things like Flickr comments, YouTube videos, etc… media and resources relevant today. There’s a subsequent website, too. Moreover, her book is more about how to build citations than just how to look them up in her book.

Shelley and I present together often, and we typically use Creative Commons images we find on Flickr for our presentations. When citing this work I’ve followed Shelley’s lead with citations, but for the traditionalist this can become concerning with authors like “ferretbaby” and “billybob69696″. In terms of Web 2.0 all students are also teachers, all writers are also authors, everyone with a camera becomes the photographer, and this is really ok albeit not everyone is ready to embrace non-refereed publication of the neophyte’s work.

As I continue to attend workshops, I watch how presentation images are cited. Sometimes there’s full pages in formal MLA or APA, other times there is a hodgepodge of information that may include the URL, may include the name of the creator, and may include date information. I say “may include” because many times this information isn’t there. I’ve seen huge discrepancies from all sorts of people to colleagues who model writing styles daily in their classes to some of the top instructional technologists in my field. I was surprised recently to realize 1) many of my high school colleagues don’t even know where to begin with writing styles and 2) many of them don’t teach documentation style at all.

Some presenters I see make up their own citation style based off of real styles. If we as educators learn to understand these styles, then when something new emerges, we can work through the citation format. Shelley and I have been pulling creative commons images from Flickr for most of this year now to use for presentations, and below you will see the citation style we use.

As you can see here the syntax is different than you’d expect, but you have the creative commons denotation (CC), the uploader’s name (we call this person uploader because we can’t differentiate who has shot the photo versus who has upload privileges), how we can to find the image, the title, and the link (embedded). One thing to note here is that it’s more important in understanding the different parts of a citation to learn how to do build this rather than just arbitrarily pasting a URL under a photo they snagged from who-knows-where on the web. That personally scares me. Of course, I always hear the argument of “why bother?”, but think of it this way. If I shot that photo, spent time downloading it, spent time composing it, and spent more time editing it in CS3, then you better damn well believe I want attribution. If we fail to keep this in mind, then powerful collective concepts like creative commons fails and you can go back to using clip art or buying stock photos. None of us want that.

Presenter at state conference whose data citation included ONLY the URL.

Notice that this man has used this famous image of Barack Obama and provides a link only. He didn’t even attribute the artist. This presentation image was shot by me at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco in March 2009. Not even at this prestigious conference does some presenters both with writing style citations.

Now that MLA has released their 2009 updates, and with the recent release of the 2009 APA updated style guide and all of the controversy over the blatant errors with that guide, I have no idea where we’re headed. I do know only that as the few strive for consistency of the seas of writing, for me, the beacon of light of the holy writ of style guides is muddied by the clouds of the academy who cannot make up their minds.

The coolest part of the conference though was seeing PJ Haarsma, author of The Softwire Series, again. He and I have presented together a few other times, and I’ve written about my work with him HERE and HERE before. This time he brought fellow author, Frank Beddor, with him to Arizona. Frank’s primary, current work is The Looking Glass Wars. He, as I’ve written here, posited the What If Alice Liddell really did come from Wonderland and was in fact the last remain heir to the Hart throne, after her wicked Aunt Red (think Queen of Hearts) had her family slaughtered. This narrative became the The Looking Glass Wars series and the Hatter M comic series.

Jim Blasingame, board president of Kids Need to Read and ASU professor, invited several people to his home the evening of conference, including yours truly. PJ and Frank are those rare breed of author who truly cares to engage children in reading and finding innovative ways to excite children about reading. Moreover, they are just nice guys.

The Kindle’s form factor is thing and larger than the iTouch, and all it does is allow you to read, download text, and and annotate. Plus it is damn expensive and for the price, foughetaboutit! Not too mention it’s easier to break because of the fragility of the factor. For me, I enjoy several different sorts of applications for my iTouch. I use educational mobile apps, games, travel apps internet utility apps, obviously my eReaders, games and some other random things.

My daughter, Claire, spending an evening out with dad at an event, playing games on my iTouch.

I’ve installed Evernote, which my friend Alan discusses at length HERE, as well as Shmoop LINK which is a mobile study guide system for history and English. Many of the games I have installed are for my daughter, but her favorite is Word Magic which allows her to learn to spell by giving her an image and a word with letters missing. She fills it in and wins virtual medals and ribbons. She can play this for hours. My travel apps were a huge deal last summer when I toured Europe, and these include Skype (which you can use easily with a miced ear piece), translators for the languages of the countries I visited, Google Maps, language dictionaries, and currency converters. Some of the coolest internet utilities I have include, obviously, Google Apps, Google Voice (before it’s ben embargoed by who knows whom), Tweetdeck, Yelp, Twitterific, Facebook, Remember the Milk, and Tumblr. My eReaders include Sony eReader Pro, which is absolute favorite because I can bookmark a page by “dog-earing” it, Stanza, which has a powerful file converter application for the computer side, and, of course, Kindle, which I actually find myself using infrequently.

I am a self-proclaimed bibliophile and was apprehensive to begin reading books electronically, but you know what? After reading a chapter, I was hooked. I could take as many books with me anywhere in the world, read in the dark (think LCD screen), and I completely forgot it wasn’t paper in front of me. No issue. I have now read about a dozen books in three months on my iTouch and haven’t look back.

Did I mention free wireless anywhere there’s a signal in the world? It’s like a mini-computer in my pocket!

After I finished talking to my colleague about that, her response was “Looks like I have a lot more research to do before settling for a Kindle.”

Many of my colleagues who have dismissed YouTube as a dumping ground for “look at what funny stuff my dog can do” have missed out on a fabulous resource. Don’t get me wrong, there are some amusing videos featuring different animals doing lots of unlikely things; however, there also are tons of “how-to” videos. You need to learn how to do a certain crochet stitch, ask YouTube. You need to know how to check a certain car part, ask YouTube. You want your students to properly format their documents with headers, footers, page breaks, and hanging indents…yes, you guessed it, ask YouTube!

So this is just a short reminder to stop wasting time getting frustrated with your students and/or spending time in your class showing students how to do these things, just start assigning these videos to your students before papers are due! And what if you can’t find a YouTube video for what you need to show them, contribute to the resources by making your own video. It’s quick, it’s easy, just use Jing (a free screen capture software) and you’ll be making your own “how-to” video in no time.

This post was written originally here by Shelley Rodrigo, co-author of The Wadsworth Guide to Research.

Frank Beddor

They both made worlds for their books, and to do that well, Frank said it took him two years to build his world, and as he wrote the narrative sometimes wholes filled into his world. It took him two years before he even began writing the first book. PJ’s books are sci-fi so he has to use more science for his book, and he has volumes of journals of science. He used that information for the background information. PJ hopes his book is a stepping stone towards science fiction for kids.

Editors don’t understand social networking and multimedia. Many times the authors who know those things were working in the classrooms, and the publishers weren’t listening. The publishers wouldn’t even put PJ’s website on his first book. PJ had so much tension with his publisher that he met with the president. The publishers only think about making books, but they don’t think beyond that. Publishers don’t contribute money to books but just to funds, and there is a disconnect between publishers and sellers. The publishers don’t have any control where books are placed in bookstores, even.

PJ Haarsma

Kids aren’t getting excited by the titles presented to them. When these authors go into schools and make kids excited about reading, then they read more. PJ even started a non-profit called http://www.kidsneedtoread.org/ to promote exciting kids about reading. Authors like Frank and PJ are changing the way students read, and someways include graphic novels, video games, chunking book text into the games, ereaders, and other ideas that they’ve not shared.

Frank said he understood and tried to nail down the structure in the Alyss books, and as he became more confident in book 2 and book 3 he moved away from the structure and became more confident in his writing. The first book took five years, but the second and third one only took 18 months each.

Science Fiction is difficult to get into, and PJ’s purpose with The Softwire Series was to make a jumping point towards heavier sci-fi. He clearly kept the names simple instead of using more difficult name. After The Softwire PJ recommends moving towards Asimov, Hienlen, and Card, as a pathway to heavier sic-fi, like Cyberpunk.

Someone asked about how to make archetypes work within the literature. PJ said you should first nail down the story first and then massage the characters into the narrative, while Frank focuses on the characters first and through them the stories emerge.

They went on to answer more questions and then thanked everyone before leaving the stage.

While I know less about Tillman and don’t have developed comments of my own without researching more and reading the Krakauer book about him, Where Men Win Glory, I do know McCandless. My AP classes just finished Into the Wild and as wanted to know if McCandless was elfish or selfless. We had wild debates about this topic in class, but we never came to any sort of conclusion. Toward the end of one of these hour long debates, I suddenly thought of Tillman. At first I hated Tillman because of what he represented by the government, but as I think more and more about it, I hesitate to pass judgment.

When we arrived at Dobson HS tonight, I discovered close seats near the podium and was excited to be about 20′ from where Krakauer would speak. After a short wait, the Changing Hands person came up to introduce Krakauer who was right behind her. We had our touch with fame as he walked within 10′ of us. I shot several pictures as he began discussing Tillman. He began a slideshow of he made of photos and videos from Afghanistan when he was researching Tillman and he read the excerpt where Tillman was killed.

Afterward he opened for questions and most were about Tillman. One or two people wandered into a discussion of Under the Banner of Heaven or Into the Wild, so I figured my question wouldn’t be too far off. He called on me pretty quickly. I explained to him that I’ve taught Into the Wild for the last five years and he actually thanked me. I then told him I couldn’t understand how Tillman could not give up everything without some idea that he’s be glorified for what he was doing. Krakauer agreed and discussed with me how Tillman’s journals argued back and forth the very point about walking away from his wife and family for his country.

Next I asked him my second part. Was McCandless selfish and how do the journeys of these men parallel. Krakauer told my questions was great and really tough to answer. He talked briefly about Tillman, and he said my kids should continue the discussion about McCandless in class: “You students should keep talking about that. I’d love to sit in on that conversation.” Wow. Wouldn’t we like that? He did move on before talking any more about McCandless and after a few more questions, the hosts had to cut off questioning so he could sign.

I was in the B group so I wanted a short 10 minutes before getting in line. Several people I ended up knowing were there and said my question was profound, and what did I think the answer was. Or what did I think Krakauer thought it was. It was my turn to find out.

The line moved quickly and I got up towards the end to get my books signed. I reminded him who I was, and then I said, “Well, is McCandless selfish?” Krakauer looked up at me and answered. “Yes, he was selfish and rightfully so.” He went on to discuss with me the familial problems McCandless faced and we discussed my teaching his novel. I thanked him as he asked about my British version of Into the Wild that I had him signed, and then we parted ways with a hand shake. For me, this was like meeting a rock star.

Tonight I was subbing at MCC for a colleague and conveniently immediately beforehand, Chris Crutcher, author of several young adult novels, was speaking here in the library to kick off banned book week.

He opened with a story about two penguins attempting to nurture a rock that was egg sized. The zoologists realized that it didn’t matter to the penguins so they took an abandoned egg and gave it to two male penguins to nurture. That egg succeeded and hatched, and those two male penguins raised that chick. To them it didn’t matter if there were two men or no females, etc… It was two penguins raising a baby. He segued into how this story was not about homosexuals and had nothing to do with that, and now, in today’s culture, book banning has gone to the extreme. Then he moved into a discussion about book banning.

It the 1950s and 1960s some books were banned, but then it continued to get out of hand. Conservatives argue that “If kids read stuff that they shouldn’t read yet IN THEIR TERMS, then they’re going to be bad.” Who’s to say what the terms should be? Crutcher grew up in the 1960s and after he graduated, he went to Spokane to work as a therapist.

When he wrote Chinese Handcuffs and toured about the book a young woman came up to him and asked “how did you know about my life?” The girl’s English teacher gave her the book and he had the two of them talk. Crutcher said it doesn’t matter that some people were offended by the book, but in this case, this girl was able to get the help she needed.

As a licensed therapist for over two decades, as a teacher, and as a novelist with over ten books, he understands how to skim the truths off the stories he hears; as a therapist, he knows he cannot tell their real stories, but over and over again these truths emerge from writing. “They are pockets where the author just elbows up against people’s beliefs.” Something about books get people going.

Now Crutcher is talking about Deadline, which is the book by him that I own, and about the young man who is living on borrowed time. In this book he makes education and school important; he also makes this about life and living it to the most. Crutcher read chapter 1 of Deadline about Ben Wolf discovering he is terminally ill and choosing to tell no one about it. He made the book mysteriously engaging and those in the room who’ve not read this before sat enrapt.

Crutcher thought it would be easy to write Deadline after the first chapter. He wanted to write a novel about life not about death and how a person who has a short period of time left can make his mark on the world. These “nuggets” or challenges that are thrown at Ben are how he reacts to these situations through that year. Crutcher uses people he knows and in dealing with families, he has come across sex offenders in his work, and he wanted Ben Wolf to meet and engage with this sort of person, so we can see how mankind relates to other people, including people like this who are the bottom of the barrel in prisons, people who are destroyed by the people around them and regret their own illnesses more than anyone. And Ben Wolf meets this sort of person, and by bringing up hard issues and dealing with them in his novels, of course, Chris Crutcher’s books have been banned.

Without addressing the hard issues, without pulling them out into the open, without discussing them, then these issues will continue to fester. Instead of standing up for books we DO like, we need to stand up for the books DON’T like.

Chris Crutcher ended with the paraphrases comment here, and then he opened it for Q&A.

“Kelsey Texting” found on Flickr by searching Creative Commons using keyterms “texting” and “school”.

Academia may whine that these new forms of writing aren’t good, but Lunsford points out that today’s students and the “modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.” I found this argument telling, and push my students to encourage any and all writing. Parents sometimes believe twittering is for teens and wierdos and others are only on Facebook to watch their own children, and I get the sideways glance when I run Twitter & Facebook workshops for the Boomer Generations but ladies and gentleman, I am a rhetorician, a compositon teacher, and a love of language. All language.