Infinite Thinking Machine

Live in Elluminate Thursday with Sharon Peters and Noble Kelly on "Education Beyond Borders"

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:39:00 +0000

Date: Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT (international times here)

Duration: 1 hour

Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room 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 at the event page.

Event and Recording Page: http://www.learncentral.org/event/60485

Join me on Thursday evening as I talk with Sharon Peters and Noble Kelly about "Education Beyond Borders."

Sharon Peters (M.A. Ed. Tech.) is the director of technology at Hebrew Academy in Montreal, Canada. In ’08 and '09, she led teams who facilitated professional dev. workshops with the non-profit NGO Education Beyond Borders (formerly Teachers Without Borders Canada) to educators in South Africa and rural Kenya. Her students have participated in award-winning collaborative projects with other classes around the world.

Mr. Noble Kelly is a High School Educator of 18 years. He has taught computer science, information technology, math, business courses. Mr. Kelly has a Post Baccalaureate in Educational Technology. He has worked as a teacher mentor and trainer for the Simon Fraser University Educational Technology Post Baccalaureate program and currently facilitates workshops to teachers as part of his role as a member of the Peace and Global Education action group for the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. He has volunteered in South Africa since 2005 with schools and orphanages. He is presently on educational leave devoting this time to establishing Education Beyond Borders and making it his life’s work.

Education Beyond Borders is a non-profit NGO devoted to closing the education divide through teacher professional development and community education. We are focused on advancing and supporting the movement for educators and advocates for education to do our part in supporting our colleagues and their students in disadvantaged regions here at home and around the world.

http://www.educationbeyondborders.org

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Live Interview Tonight with the Authors of Total Recall

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Date: Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT (international times here)

Duration: 1 hour

Event and Recording Page: http://www.learncentral.org/event/60484

"What if you could remember everything? Soon, if you choose, you will be able to conveniently and affordably record your whole life in minute detail. In Total Recall, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories."

Join me for a live and interactive interview with Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, co-authors of Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. This is a fascinating look into a future that is coming very quickly.

Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, currently working on the next generation of search. Previously, Jim's research focus was MyLifeBits, part of the CARPE research community, whose first and second workshops he was proud to chair. Jim has also done research on the topics of personal media management/enhancement, telepresence, and reliable multicast. His research has led to features in Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, and Bing.com. He lives in the San Francisco area. For more about Jim, see his web page.

Since 1998, Gordon Bell has been working on the MyLifeBits project with Jim Gemmell – a quest to understand how you store everything in your life in cyberspace. MyLifeBits is a personal transaction processing database. MyLifeBits captures and holds a lifetime's worth of articles, books, letters, memos, photos, presentations, music, home movies, and videotaped lectures. Gordon’s archive includes phone calls, IM scripts, years of email, web pages visited, and daily activities captured by the SenseCam. One of the challenges of MyLifeBits has been to build applications, e.g. timelines and viewers for people to take their personal memorabilia out of the shoebox and store them digitally for all kinds of future usage from a daily aid to memory through record keeping to immortality.

Total Recall is the book written by Jim Gemmell, the project leader, and Gordon about the MyLifeBits induced vision of the inevitability of Total Recall. In 2010, Gordon’s personal store or e-memory is over a quarter of a Terabyte, and the data is accumulating at about 1 Gigabyte per month.

Gordon has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research since 1995. He is the former vice president of research and development at Digital Equipment Corporation (1960-1983); professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University (1966-72); founding assistant director of the National Science Foundation's Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate (1986-1988); panel chair of the National Research and Education Network (NREN) for creating the Internet (1987-1988); advisor/investor to 100+ High Tech start-up companies (1983- ); and a founding trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. He has written several books about computer architecture and High Tech Ventures (1991) with John McNamara describing the Bell Mason Diagnostic. He is a member of the Bell Mason Group that consults on starting corporate ventures.

Gordon created ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize in 1987 to acknowledge and reward progress in parallel processing. He is a fellow of the ACM, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, IEEE, NAE, NAS, and 1991 National Medal of Technology medalist.

For a complete biography and publication list, please see Gordon's webpage and MyLifeBits.com.

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

This Week's Exciting Live and Interactive Events

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:00 +0000

Below are this week's public, free, and interactive webinars through LearnCentral.org, the social learning network for education that I work on for Elluminate.

The time of the events below will show up automatically in your own time zone when you are registered in LearnCentral and when you have chosen your time zone in your profile. Event recordings are posted and available after the events if you aren't able to attend them live. Be on the lookout for Australia-time-friendly events as part of the new Australia Series!

I also hope you'll consider hosting your own public webinars using the LearnCentral public room--instructions are available by joining the "Host Your Own Webinar" group on the main announcement tab (http://www.learncentral.org/group/3432/host-your-own-webinars).

Additional Notes:

Wednesday, March 10th, is "Hats On Day" and I'll be changing my avatar to one with me in my original SupportBlogging.com hat. :) Theresa Beffa, my co-host at Conversations.net, alerts us to this tribute to kids with cancer on the 15th anniversary of the death of her brother from Non-Hodkin's Lymphoma. He'd lost all his hair, so his friends started the now-national "Hats On Day" to show their support (now over 2,000 schools participate). You can show your support in the same way on the 10th. Get more information and read the tender story on Theresa's blog.
From our good friends at PBS we are reminded that the deadline for entries for their PBS TEachers Innovation Awards is March 12th. More details at www.pbs.org/teachers/innovators!

Tuesday, March 9th

2:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 10:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
"Social Bookmarking: Can You Digg It? Web Applications for Research." Some of the advanced social bookmarking tools, like Diigo, not only allow users to easily track resources but also facilitate close reading and notetaking as well presentations of the resources in an organized manner. This webinar will provide faculty an opportunity to think about what, how, and why they are structuring research assignments as well as what technologies they might have their students use within a research projects. Rochelle Rodrigo hosts.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/52298

4:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 12:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
"Emerging Technology in Education." Host Kevin Murphy leads a panel on renewable energy tech in education with John Carey from Franklin County Tech, Nathanael Fortune from Smith College, and Martin Espinola from the Gill-Montague Regional School District.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/53104

5:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 1:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
"Digital Storytelling" with Bernard R. Robin. The first in a series of MERLOT Classic Award Winning presentations, Professor Robin will be presenting his site, Digital Storytelling, and will answer questions about the development of the site and how he has used it in the classroom. He is an Associate Professor in the Instructional Technology Program in the University of Houston's College of Education.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/60483

Wednesday, March 10th

12:30pm Pacific Time (US) / 8:30pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Eric Biederbeck hosts a Web tools survey: "Animoto and Glogster." Part of the MSP2 series, in this session students will demonstrate how to use both to create a visually stunning presentation that reports out information about a specific topic.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/51985
1:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 9:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Marian Heddesheimer presents "eT@alking Tuesdays: 3D-Teaching and Learning in Second Life." Part of The Australia Series, this presentation will give you a rough overview about how to use Second Life ® (SL) for teaching and/or learning.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/61556
5:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 1:00am GMT/UTC (international times):
I interview Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell on their fascinating new book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. We'll try to answer Bill Gates question: "What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?"
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/60484
6:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 2:00am GMT/UTC (international times):
Bud Hunt introduces the ISTE 2010 Leadership Bootcamp in a session titled "Amplified, Customized, & Maximized." Bud will talk about how to get involved and also discuss how learning networks have, do and will continue to play a major role in communication practices. Specifically, he'll talk about how your own personal learning network can be amplified, customized, and maximized and how the structures of the Leadership Bootcamp can help you to do so.
Link: http://sites.google.com/site/leadershipbootcamp/pre-conference-events

Thursday, March 11th

2:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 10:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss host "Better with Practice: PBL Implementation Tips from the Field Session 3." This is a Webinar series of three sessions in February and March 2010. The third session topic is Evaluating Learning in PBL. We seek your input in shaping the conversation. Visit http://www.classroom20.com/group/pblbetterwithpractice
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/50931
3:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 11:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Jo Hart hosts "Edublogs Fine Focus - Elluminate White(board) Magic!" as part of The Australia Series. Join us for a "Fine Focus" session - an interactive mix of Techie and Tools about the potential of the Elluminate whiteboard and what goes on "behind the scenes" from loading a presentation to managing objects and screens.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/59862
5:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 1:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
(Repeat) Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss host "Better with Practice: PBL Implementation Tips from the Field Session 3." This is a Webinar series of three sessions in February and March 2010. The third session topic is Evaluating Learning in PBL. We seek your input in shaping the conversation. Visit http://www.classroom20.com/group/pblbetterwithpractice.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/51457
5:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 1:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
I interview Sharon Peters on "Teachers Without Borders." Sharon Peters is a high school teacher of English and computer studies as well as technology integration coach at The Study, an independent school in Montreal. During the summer of '08, she joined two teams who served with Teachers Without Borders Canada in the townships of South Africa and Kenya. Her students have participated in several award-winning international online collaborative projects with classes around the world using various online tools and environments.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/60485
6:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 1:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
Mayte Esponda presents on "Global Collaborative Student Projects: How to Create an Effective Collaborative Project to Interact Online with Schools Worldwide." Mayte, a Spanish and English teacher in Argentina, has worked with Elluminate's Fire and Ice program.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/60851

Saturday, March 13th

9:00am Pacific Time (US) / 5:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Kim Caise, Peggy George, and Lorna Costantini host the weekly Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show. This week: "Engaging Students with Interactive Technology" with special guest, Adora Svitak. Adora (http://www.adorasvitak.com) will demonstrate handy technology tools that teachers can use to create engaging, interactive learning activities for students.
Link: http://live.classroom20.com

9:00am Pacific Time (US) / 5:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Jeff Applegate hosts "Choosing and Using Video Games in the Classroom: A Coach's Role." Now that we know how to play the games, how do we lay the groundwork to support a winning team (school media/technology staff, principal, parents, as well as students)? This is the third installment of the Learning Games Network's Choosing and Using Learning Games in the Classroom series.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/58440
10:00am Pacific Time (US) / 6:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Maria Droujkova hosts "Math 2.0 Weekly." This week, Mangahigh with Chris Green.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/61835
11:00am Pacific Time (US) / 8:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Jeff Applegate hosts "Designing eGames: Prototyping Your Game." Prototyping is the stage of actually building a game—before the programming. A sample game, using paper, chips, wood or plastic pieces, etc. provides an opportunity to actually test the game play before getting to the coding.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/61500

Thanks for your attention, and see you online!

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Bernard Robin Live Tonight on Ditigal Storytelling

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:16:00 +0000

Date: Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Time: 5:00pm Pacific / 8:00pm Eastern / 1:00am (next day) GMT (int'l times here)
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed.
The Elluminate room 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 at the event page.

The good folks at MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) and and I are coordinating a MERLOT Classics Webinar Series. The series will feature MERLOT Classic Award winners from the 2008 and 2009 MERLOT International Conferences. The authors of these exemplary materials will describe their sites and the rationale for developing the site. The events will be co-hosted by Cathy Swift (MERLOT Director of Academic Partner Services), will be live and interactive, and typically one hour long--allowing for a live Q&A after the presentations.

Tonight, Bernard R. Robin will be presenting his site, Digital Storytelling, and will answer questions about the development of the site and how he has used it in the classroom.

Bernard R. Robin is an Associate Professor in the Instructional Technology Program in the University of Houston's College of Education. He came to the University of Houston in 1993 after earning a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts from the University of South Carolina, and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Dr. Robin’s advisor in the doctoral program and chair of his dissertation committee at the University of Virginia was Glen L. Bull, Ph.D., in the Curry School of Education’s Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy.

Dr. Robin teaches courses on the integration of technology into the curriculum, educational uses of multimedia and the design and development of community-based web sites. He has published numerous articles on the educational uses of emerging technologies and the professional development of teachers. He frequently works with K-12 students and teachers, as well as other university educators to help them integrate technology into their teaching and is a co-author of the book, The Educator's Guide to the Web and is the founder and former executive editor of the Texas Journal of Distance Learning.

Dr. Robin has collaborated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Gallery on the design and development of large-scale educational web sites. He is the designer and administrator of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website and serves as the chair of the Society for Technology and Teacher Education’s Special Interest Group on Digital Video and Digital Storytelling. Throughout his academic career, Dr. Robin has made presentations at local, regional, national and international conferences and has conducted educational technology workshops in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.

The Faculty Development Editorial Board said this about Bernard's site. "Educators at all levels can use Digital Storytelling in many ways, from introducing new material to helping students learn to conduct research, synthesize large amounts of content and gain expertise in the use of digital communication and authoring tools. It also can help students organize these ideas as they learn to create stories for an audience and present their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way."

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

This Week's Live and Interactive Events at LearnCentral

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:39:00 +0000

If you're coming to the CUE Conference or are in the Southern California area, please consider attending EduBloggerCon West in Palm Springs on Wednesday, March 3rd, from 1:00 - 5:00pm. It's fun and it's free! More information at http://www.edubloggercon.com/cue2010. And see below the free live CUE events that will be streamed from the conference.
Our good friends at Wikispaces (who have, by the way, helped sponsor many free teacher events) are looking for some usability testers. Those interested should email help@wikispaces.com. When you email, let them know a little about your experience level with Wikispaces (beginner, intermediate, advanced), and confirm that you can visit their office in San Francisco for about 1 hour during business hours. Testers' reward: a free year of Super service for a wiki of your choice.

Monday, March 1st

5:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 1:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
"School Library Web Presence" in the TL Cafe. Joyce Valenza and Gwyneth Jones host a discussion of effective practice and essential elements with Carolyn Foote, Buffy Hamilton, and Barbara Jansen.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/56811

Wednesday, March 3rd

1:00am Pacific Time (US) / 9:00am GMT/UTC (international times):
Anne Mirtschin hosts eT@lking Tuesdays as part of The Australia Series: "Too young to use technology in the classroom?" Many would argue that children in the earlier years of school are too young to use technology – they just need to concentrate on the 3Rs with writing as the main medium. Wrong! Come meet Amanda Marrinan, from Queensland, Australia who has connected her ‘littlies’ to others around the globe via her class blog. Hear how she got connected, why she connected and the wonderful outcomes it has produced for her class.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/56321

Wednesday, March 3rd

9:30am Pacific Time (US) / 5:30pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Shannon Autrey Forte presents Shannon's Bright Ideas Center "Publish! Showcase." We will look at Best Practices when using Publish! and share Bright Ideas. If you don't have Publish! yet, please get your free trial at www.elluminate.com/publish. "See" you there!
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/59556

Wednesday, March 3rd

6:30pm Pacific Time (US) / 2:30am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
Maria Droujkova presents Math 2.0 Weekly!
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/59556

Thursday, March 4th

ALL DAY:
Live streaming from the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) Conference in Palm Springs. Sessions will be streamed from the CUE Unplugged area at http://www.CUEUnplugged.com, including "Harnessing the Power of Web 2.0+ in School Administration" by Bradford Burns and "Politics and Civic Engagement for Our Digital Generation" by Cheryl Davis.
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/50928

Thursday, March 4th

2:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 11:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss host "Better with Practice: PBL Implementation Tips from the Field Session 2." This is a Webinar series of three sessions in February and March 2010. The second session topic is Keeping Your Project on the Rails. We seek your input in shaping the conversation. Visit http://www.classroom20.com/group/pblbetterwithpractice
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/50928

Thursday, March 4th

5:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 11:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
(Repeat) Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss host "Better with Practice: PBL Implementation Tips from the Field Session 2." This is a Webinar series of three sessions in February and March 2010. The second session topic is Keeping Your Project on the Rails. We seek your input in shaping the conversation. Visit http://www.classroom20.com/group/pblbetterwithpractice

Friday, March 5th

ALL DAY:
Live streaming from the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) Conference in Palm Springs. Sessions will be streamed from the CUE Unplugged area at http://www.CUEUnplugged.com, including:

"Building Social Constructivist Learning Environments in Online Settings" with Tammy Stephens, Dr. Lovejoy, and Connie Jaeger
"Including Technology in your Unit Planning Using Understanding by Design (UbD)" by Alice Mercer
“Hey, Just Because It Is Online Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Have Field Trips, Right?” by Todd Conaway
"Educational Social Networking for Professional Development" by me
"Sugar In Your Classroom. How Sweet It Is!" by Caryl Bigenho.

Formal sessions from the Sierra Room at CUE can be accessed at http://www.cue.org/conference/anywhere and will include:

"Rigorous Learning through Digital Storytelling" by Cindi Crandall
"Digital Storytelling across the Curriculum" by Arnie Abrams
"Videoconferencing in the Classroom" by Richard Mellott
"Library of Congress: The Power of Primary Sources" by Esther Kligman-Frey and Debra White.

Saturday, March 6th

ALL DAY:
Live streaming from the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) Conference in Palm Springs. Formal sessions from the Sierra Room at CUE can be accessed at http://www.cue.org/conference/anywhere and will include:

"Digital Textbook Summit" with expert panelists Brian Bridges, Regan Caruthers, Paul McFall, Robert Onsi, Murugan Pal, and Susan Patrick, Moderator
"Rock your Socks with Google Docs" by Scott Moss
"Podcasts and iPod Flash Cards: Study Tools for the 21st Century" by Brent Coley
"iCame, iSaw, iTouch" by Cory Robertson
"Moodle's Amazing Online Interactive Tools" by Eric Jarvis

Saturday, March 6th

9:00am Pacific Time (US) / 5:00pm GMT/UTC (international times):
Kim Caise, Peggy George, and Lorna Costantini host the weekly Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show. This week: "Sweet Search Engine for Students" with special guest Mark Moran.
Link: http://live.classroom20.com

Saturday, March 6th

7:00pm Pacific Time (US) / 3:00am (next day) GMT/UTC (international times):
LeRoy Hill hosts the Carribean Educators Network event: "Social Media & Education."
LearnCentral Link: http://www.learncentral.org/event/59464

Thanks for your attention, and see you online!

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Live Discussion with Susan Patrick and Mike Lawrence on Online Learning

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:58:00 +0000

Date: Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Time: 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern / 9pm GMT (international times here)

Duration: 1 hour

Event and Recording Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/58413

Part of the CUE series at FutureofEducation.com.

Join Mike Lawrence, the Executive Director of Computer-Using Educators (CUE), me for a live and interactive interview with Susan Patrick, President and CEO of iNACOL, the international K-12 nonprofit association representing the interests of practitioners, providers and students involved in online learning worldwide. Susan is a spotlight speaker at the upcoming CUE.org conference in Palm Springs March 4 - 6, 2010.

Susan Patrick is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). iNACOL is the international K-12 nonprofit association representing the interests of practitioners, providers and students involved in online learning worldwide.

She is the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. As Director, she published the U.S. National Education Technology Plan for Congress and managed research and technical assistance programs on educational technology. In addition, she co-chaired the federal government’s Advanced Technologies Working Group for Education and Training; and served as a member of the Secretary’s Rural Education Task Force.

In 2008, Susan Patrick was named by eSchool News, a leading national education technology journal, as one of the top 10 national education leaders who “have had a profound impact on educational technology” in the past decade for her work at iNACOL and at the U.S. Department of Education.

Prior, Patrick worked in Arizona on government technology policy and legislation under Governor Jane Dee Hull. She received the 2001 Governor’s Spirit of Excellence Award.

She is a former Site Director for Old Dominion University’s TELETECHNET distance learning program.

Patrick holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles and a bachelor’s degree from the Colorado College.

Patrick was the first woman to play in the men’s intramural football league at the Colorado College.

Susan Patrick has published articles and appeared in a variety of national news media such as CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, ABC News, NBC, CBS, US News and World Report, Christian Science Monitor, CSPAN, Computerworld, Forbes, National Public Radio, Education Week, New York Times, London Times, eSchool News, Converge, and numerous other publications.

Mike Lawrence has been impacting education as a Teacher, Speaker, Technology Coordinator and Director for more than fifteen years. He is a respected presenter at national conferences and events and was honored to be named an Apple Distinguished Educator in 2003. He also assisted in the development and launch of both the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) and the Google Teacher Academy programs. Mike is an author and editor and can often be found at his local coffee house on his laptop. He currently serves as Executive Director of Computer-Using Educators, supporting its California-based membership by advancing student achievement through technology on a national level. Each year, thousands of educators attend CUE’s conference events, making it the premier Educational Technology association of the Western US.

He began his educational career teaching high school English, often writing his own English elective courses to engage students typically disinterested in the core subject (Science Fiction Literature, anyone?). As a Technology Coordinator, he led delivery of all hands-on technology professional development, including Principal Training Programs for Southern California administrators, as well as the Student Technology Showcase and Technology Proficiency programs.

Mike’s humor and background as a teacher inform all of his presentations, making them accessible to educators of all levels and curricular areas. He lives with his wife Julie, son Jay, and daughter Kellen in Southern California.

[Cross-posted from http://www.SteveHargadon.com]

Live and Interative with the Authors of Online Education for Dummies

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:29:00 +0000

Date: Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Time: 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern / 2am (next day) GMT (international times here)

Duration: 1 hour

Event and Recording Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/58403

Part of the FutureofEducation.com Interview Series.

Join me for a live and interactive interview with Kevin Johnson and Susan Manning, the authors of Online Education for Dummies. "Online Education For Dummies explains the ins and outs of attending a virtual classroom, and provides you with the tools you need to hone your skills or obtain additional certification and degrees. This practical reference not only helps you get the most out of an online course, but also offers a wealth of advice to help you pick the one that matches your interests and needs" (publisher's blurb.)

About Kevin Johnson: "My interest in technology began when I was 14. I worked detasseling corn for a summer and saved up and bought a Commodore 64 (Whoooo! Hoooo!). I spent hours teaching myself to program, which later lead to a programming position with the University of Illinois. Anyone remember Plato terminals? I spent three years working with the Computer Adaptive Testing and Measurement team developing online study materials for domestic and international audiences.

"For the past twelve years, I have developed curriculum and taught in both academic and corporate environments. Even though I have taught multiple subjects, a majority of my teaching has centered on technology. After graduating with my Master of Education degree from the University of Illinois, I moved to California where I taught for a Business College. Due to my desire to save paper (not to mention the desire to no longer fight for the copy machine), I started providing lecture notes and other resources to students on CDs. As the Internet emerged, the college asked me to teach a web development course. It was a natural transition for me to move from burning CDs to placing course content on the web. Before I knew it, I was interacting with my students electronically and my interest in online education began. It was this interest that pushed me to participate in the Online Teaching and Learning program through California State University-Hayward.

"The online program through CSU is similar to the MVCR program offered by the Illinois Online Network (http://www.ion.uillinois.edu), where I have designed and taught online courses focusing in areas of online pedagogy, instructional design, web design, synchronous communication and more. I also facilitated a state-wide initiative whose goal was to develop a rubric outlining quality standards for online courses.
Recently, I served as the Coordinator of Instructor Support for the University of Illinois Global Campus (http://global.uillinois.edu). In this position, I provided pedagogical and technical support to instructors, supervise the mentoring program, and participate in mentoring and evaluating instructors. I left this position to start my own education consulting compnay called The Cutting Ed, Inc. (http://thecuttinged.com). The company specializes in helping clients envision education and training for the 21st century. I also just finished coauthoring the book Online Education for Dummies with Dr. Susan Manning (shameless plug, I know. *smile* ).

"In January of last year, I decided to continue my education journey and have enrolled in a doctoral program through Nova Southeastern (http://www.nova.edu). The program is a doctorate of education degree with a concentration in instructional technology and distance education (http://www.schoolofed.nova.edu/doctoral/concentrations/itde.htm). One of the reasons this course is so important to me is the fact that my research looks at the institutional contributors to the job satisfaction level of distant adjunct faculty."

About Susan Manning: Susan Manning teaches Instructional Design for Online Learning.
Professionally, Susan Manning is best known as a teacher’s teacher, that is developing faculty and preparing them to teach online. She teaches courses in online learning, technology tools, the synchronous classroom and instructional design. She also delivers workshops on adapting curriculum for online delivery, podcasting and selecting the right technology tools. She has taught hundreds of faculty, mostly from the Midwest, but occasionally drawing from Saudi Arabia, Denmark and Russia.

Susan is co-author of Online Education for Dummies along with Kevin Johnson. Susan is also recognized as one of the early voices in educational podcasting. Currently, Susan is co-host of the LearningTimes Green Room podcast that explores themes in learning and technology.

Susan’s online career began more than 10 years ago when she was asked to investigate the possibility of training literacy volunteers online. Knowing that she needed additional training and skills development, Susan became an online student and earned her certification as Master Online Teacher from the University of Illinois. Additionally, she holds a Doctorate in Adult Education from Ball State University (1991), a Masters in College Student Personnel from Bowling Green State University (1983) and a Bachelors in Communications from Truman State University (1981).

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Live and Interactive with Clay Shirky on Thursday

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:56:00 +0000

Date: Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Time: 3pm Pacific / 6pm Eastern / 11pm GMT (international times here)

Duration: 1 hour

Event and Recording Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/55281

Part of the Conversations.net and FutureofEducation.com Interview Series.

Join me as I interview Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, a book that has profoundly influenced the discussions of social media and education.

Mr. Clay Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.

His website is at http://www.shirky.com.

Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com

Dan Pink Discussing His New Book Drive

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:16:00 +0000

Date: Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room 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 visithttp://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page (here).
Event and Recording Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/56771

Part of the Conversations.net and FutureofEducation.com Interview Series.

Join me as I interview Dan Pink about his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Of course, we'll dive into my favorite topics: the implications for education of his work, and how he sees the Internet changing our culture and society.

Daniel H. Pink is the author of several provocative, bestselling books about the changing world of work.

His latest is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which uses 40 years of behavioral science to overturn the conventional wisdom about human motivation and offer a more effective path to high performance. Early reviews say that “Pink’s analysis–and new model–of motivation offers tremendous insight into our deepest nature” (Publishers Weekly) and call the book “important reading . . . an integral addition to a growing body of literature calling for a radical shift in how businesses operate” (Kirkus).

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future charts the rise of right-brain thinking in modern economies and describes the six abilities individuals and organizations must master in an outsourced, automated age. A Whole New Mind is a long-running New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller that has been translated into 21 languages.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need is the first American business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga and the only graphic novel ever to become a BusinessWeek bestseller. Illustrated by award-winning artist Rob Ten Pas, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko has been translated into 14 languages.

Dan’s first book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, was a Washington Post bestseller that Publishers Weekly says “has become a cornerstone of employee-management relations.”

His articles on business and technology appear in many publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Wired, where he is a contributing editor. He has provided analysis of business trends on CNN, CNBC, ABC, NPR, and other networks in the U.S. and abroad. He also lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on economic transformation and the new workplace.

A free agent himself, Dan held his last real job in the White House, where he served from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He also worked as an aide to U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich and in other positions in politics and government.

He received a BA, with honors, from Northwestern University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. To his lasting joy, he has never practiced law.

Dan lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children.

His website is at DanPink.com

[Cross-posted from SteveHargadon.com]

Lisa Gillis on Virtual Schooling

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Date: Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (international times here)

Duration: 1 hour

Join me for a live and interactive interview with Lisa Gillis tonight, Tuesday, February 9th.

Lisa Gillis is the Director of Government Affairs and School Development at Insight Schools, Inc. She is the co-author of “Virtual Schooling: A Parent’s Guide to Optimizing Your Child’s Education” published by Macmillan in June 2009.

Lisa has worked with thousands of students during her years of public school service including teaching and administrative assignments in the regular classroom, Special Ed, Independent Study, and GATE. At the leadership level, she has served in both school development and school management roles in both traditional and virtual schools, helping to launch schools in over 10 different states, specializing in high school development. She served on an administrative team managing a network of statewide virtual charter schools serving over 6,000 students. She is a graduate of the California School Leadership Academy (CSLA), has served as a Consultant to the California Department of Education, and holds both Administrative and Teaching credentials. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Oregon State University and a Master of Arts in Education Administration from Sonoma State University.

Lisa regularly is a presenter and serves on panels at national conferences, provides guidance on public policy issues to lawmakers, and works to inform educators regarding current legislative challenges, events and solutions. She is the Chairman of the iNACOL Advocacy and Issues Committee, is a member of the iNACOL “How to Start an Online Program” advisory committee, sits on the board for the National Council of Education Providers and serves as the Private Sector Chairman for the Special Needs Subcommittee and Executive Education Committee for ALEC.

http://www.insightschools.net/

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Great Reasons to Attend the CUE Conference This Year

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:27:00 +0000

I have a special appreciation for the annual CUE conference, held each year in Palm Springs, this year March 4 - 6. And no, it's not the unpredictable weather of Palm Springs at that time of year (did anyone else get caught in that blizzard a couple of years ago!?). It's that the organizers of CUE have been foremost in supporting innovative projects that have really benefited the educational community.

CUE was home to the first ever EduBloggerCon. CUE let us set up the first Open Source Pavilion at an ed tech show, and let us run the first official Open Source speaker track. CUE provides a Bloggers' Cafe are for social media folks to gather, network, and hook up to the Net. CUE supported the first Ning community at a major ed tech show. Their support--and continuation--of these grass-roots initiatives each year has been groundbreaking, and has spread to several other conferences around the country. And his year is no different: CUE is letting us run "CUE Unplugged," a wonderful opportunity to participate at CUE that's described in more detail below.

Details on the fun at CUE are below. Thanks to Mike, Marisol, and the crew at CUE!

EduBloggerCon West (Wednesday, March 3rd, 1;00 - 5:00pm):

The first ever EduBloggerCon took place at the Shakey's Pizza Parlor during CUE four years ago, and there were just two of us there (big shout out to Barbara Barreda)! Now a regular event at several conferences each year, EduBloggerCon is an opportunity for those who are interested in the use of social media in education to gather in "unconference" style and share and learn. You don't have to be a blogger to come, and EduBloggerCon is always free! CUE provides us with the meeting space and free power and wireless--so bring your laptop, your desire to learn, and join us from from 1:00 - 5:00pm at the Palm Springs Convention Center in the Mesquite F room. You can register for EduBloggerCon West at http://www.cue2010.org/. Suggestions for discussion topics can be added at http://www.edubloggercon.com/cue2010.

CUE Unplugged (Thursday and Friday, March 4th and 5th):

If you've ever wanted to speak at CUE or a conference, but have never had the chance, now is your time! CUE Unplugged is a series of concurrent sessions being held at CUE in a presentation area where anyone can sign up to present. Really! Maybe you've been trying to work up the courage to present, and just need this encouragement. Or maybe you are an expert presenter, but a topic you wanted to speak on came up after the deadline to submit to speak. In either case, or for any other reason, all you have to do to speak at CUE this year is to sign up on the wiki in free slot: http://www.cueunplugged.com/. If you need any help signing up, just email me (steve@hargadon.com) and we'll get you going.

All of the Unplugged sessions will also be streamed live through Elluminate, so if you can't attend CUE physically you can still watch some of the activity remotely! I'm also looking for some volunteers to help attend to the Elluminate streaming--no prior experience necessary. Alice Mercer is helping to coordinate this effort, so if you think you might be able to help, let me or Alice know!

The Open Source Pavilion and Speaker Series:

Not only does CUE let us set up dozens of computers using Linux and Open Source Software in a lab setting so that you can see what Open Source is and how it works, they also run a speaker series on Open Source that has become the standard for educational ed tech shows. Look for the lab at the conference (it's hard to miss us because the lab becomes the conference evaluation station!), and consider coming to some of our sessions!

The Bloggers' Cafe:

Look for the Bloggers' Cafe at CUE--a great place to socialize, grab some network access, and relax with others. You don't have to be a blogger here either, but it's a fun place to put faces to the names of your blogging, tweeting, SL, or other online friends!

Twitter!

So, I'm not officially in charge of Twitter activities or tweeting or "tweet-ups" at CUE, but CUE has a page with Twitter feeds at http://www.cue.org/conference/featuredstrands and the general "hashtag" for CUE is #cue10. I'm sure there will be lots of Twitter love at the conference... :)

Here's hoping to see you at CUE!

James Paul Gee on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:59:00 +0000

Date: Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room 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 at the event page (here).

Join me and Ed Hill for a live and interactive interview with James Paul Gee on Wednesday, February 3rd.

Professor Gee is well-known for his "provocative examination" of the positive effects on learning of video games. He's currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studeis at Arizona State University, and is the author of the acclaimed What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

James Paul Gee is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades.

Professor Gee's most recent books deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent book is Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007). Professor Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

http://www.jamespaulgee.com

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Shel Israel: Talk WITH Me--From Blogging to Twitter

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:08:00 +0000

Date: Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room 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 at the event page (here).

Join me on Thursday, February 4th, for a live and interactive interview with Shel Israel on social media and his unique role and perspective.

Shel Israel is co-author of the groundbreaking Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, and his newest book is Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods. He is an expert on how businesses use social media in marketing, communications, and customer support. He works with businesses of all sizes on social media strategy and high-level business issues. Among the companies he has helped are Wells Fargo Bank, Sun Microsystems, Dell Computer, CNET, Intel as well as scores of startups.

Israel has contributed editorially to BusinessWeek and FastCompanyTV. His GlobalNeighbourhoods.net, blog is among the 100 most popular business blogs, according to Ad Age.

Prior to the advent of social media, Israel advised technology startup companies on communications. He worked with the startups that initially launched Sun Microsystems, PowerPoint, PC sound and desktop mapping. When the Worldwide Web emerged, Israel consulting agency became the first to focus exclusively on internet startups and worked with several memorable pioneers of that era.

Since 2005, Israel has focused exclusively on social media and how it is used in business, education, journalism, nonprofit organizations and in global personal communications. Israel has been covered by Forbes magazine, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and many respected online and traditional publications.

He is a popular keynote speaker. Since 2006, he has addressed more than 100 audiences in nine countries on social media business topics. He speaks on a wide variety of topics related to social media. Including:
· Joining the Conversation: moving from traditional marketing into conversational marketing
· Twitterville People: he tells the real world stories of how Twitter has dramatically helped companies grow, provide greater customer service and changed the dynamic of the
human conversation
· How Social Media Improves your Organization: this highly customized talk is tailored to the professional interests of each audience.
· Online Enterprise communities: touring virtual spaces to find real business benefits.

Israel is a senior fellow to the Society for New Media Research (SNCR) an organization that researches all aspects of social media for business, academia and government and on the board of advisors for the Social Media Club and SmartBrief on Social Media.

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Tara Hunt on Understanding Social Networking, Authenticity, and Trust

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:06:00 +0000

Date: Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room 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 at the event page (here).

Join me for a live and interactive interview with Tara Hunt on Tuesday, February 2nd.

Tara Hunt's new book, The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, is an amazing tour and tutorial on the world of social capital, authenticity, and trust. It's probably been the most thought-provoking book for me since I read Clay Shirkey's Here Comes Everybody. While primarily written with a business audience in mind, the ideas here will be of huge significance to anyone operating in this new world of social media.

Tara 'missrogue' Hunt, named as one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company Magazine, has spent the past fifteen years living her life online. From the first wave of online marketing as it emerged in the late 90’s while in Canada all the way to being a pioneer of new marketing in Silicon Valley in 2005, leading the wave into Web 2.0: the participatory web.

Tara understands how the participatory web is changing all of our relationships: B2C, B2B and C2C. She doesn’t believe in pushing messages or creating strong brands, only in the power of building relationships. After spending 4 years in San Francisco, she moved to Montreal to write her next book (working title ‘Happiness as Your Business Model’) in August 2009.

Tara blogs at HorsePigCow, is on Twitter under her superhero name MissRogue, posts a great deal of self-portraits on Flickr, can be located like Carmen Sandiego on Dopplr, is trying to shake her addiction to Facebook, publishes her resume with microformats and is pretty much as open as one can be anywhere online.

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

What's Your Issue Videography Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Wesley Fryer) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:58:00 +0000

Thanks to a Facebook post this weekend by Marco Torres, I learned about "What's Your Issue:"

A Global Initiative and Competition for the next generation of leaders and social entrepreneurs - Seeking global thinkers 14 to 24... For 2010, we are looking for 3-minute videos with Issue & Solution format. Express your issue and propose an innovative solution-project. Winners presented to Obama administration, on Best Buy screens across the planet, and at VIP reception and Awards Ceremony hosted by Sony Pictures in Los Angeles.

This sixty second YouTube spot summarizes the project and contest. If you have any of the "digital natives" Marc Prensky talks about on the "digital_nation" website in your classroom or household, you might give them a heads-up on this contest. :-)

Cross-posted to the Storychasers blog.

Technorati Tags:
contest, digital, nation, video

Live and Interactive Interview with Daniel Coyle on "The Talent Code"

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:04:00 +0000

UPDATED - New Date

Date: 01 February 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT
Location: In Elluminate at http://tr.im/futureofed
Use the URL above to enter the Elluminate room, which will be open 30 minutes before the session begins. If you haven't used Elluminate before, you can go to http://www.elluminate.com/support to ensure that your system is configured correctly. A recording of the event will be able to be found at http://www.learncentral.org/node/51768 within a day of the show.

Join me for a live and interactive interview with Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code.

Journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle visited nine of the world’s greatest talent hotbeds — tiny places that produce huge amounts of talent, from a small music camp in upstate New York to an elementary school in California to the baseball fields of the Caribbean.

He found that there’s a pattern common to all of them — certain methods of training, motivation, and coaching. This pattern, which has to do with the fundamental mechanisms through which the brain acquires skill, gives us a new way to think about talent — as well as new tools with which we can unlock our own talents and those of our kids.

Daniel Coyle is a contributing editor for Outside magazine and the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller Lance Armstrong’s War. He has written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Play (including this March 2007 cover story which sparked The Talent Code), and is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist. Coyle lives with his wife, Jen, and their four children in Homer, Alaska.

[Cross-posted from www.stevehargadon.com]

Live Today at 2pm Pacific: Innosight on Hybrid Learning

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:26:00 +0000

Date: 26 January 2010
Time: 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 10pm GMT
Location: In Elluminate at http://tr.im/futureofed
A recording of the event will be able to be found at http://www.learncentral.org/node/51752 within a day of the show.

Join me for another in the series of reports from the Innosight Institute, this time profiling a high school that serves primarily low-income students in Chicago with a hybrid model of learning—a fully online curriculum embedded in a physical school. The authors hope that this case study, "VOISE Academy: Pioneering a blended-learning model in a Chicago high school" will help to "open our eyes" to how online learning can work in a physical environment by studying hybrid models that provide clues about how to combine the best of both worlds for the betterment of students.

In our session, James Sloan, the co-author of the "VOISE" case study, will be joined by co-author Katherine Mackey and Innosight Executive Director Michael Horn to discuss this report. The Innosight Institute was founded by Clayton Christensen, professor and author of the best-selling books The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution.

Located in a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden neighborhood in Chicago, VOISE, which stands for Virtual Opportunities Inside a School Environment, melds a culture of high expectations and no excuses with an online, individualized learning model that allows students to learn at their own pace, progress to new material only after they have mastered a lesson, and receive rapid feedback on how they are doing so that their teachers can further individualize their lessons to meet their distinct needs. In only its second year of operations, VOISE has attracted national attention and has a freshman on-track rate that exceeds the Chicago Public Schools average.

Download the full case study here: http://cts.vresp.com/c/?InnosightInstitute/2bade61158/35789c1b28/6b1dad3b51

Use the URL near the top of this event to enter the Elluminate room, which will be open 30 minutes before the session begins. If you haven't used Elluminate before, you can go to http://www.elluminate.com/support to ensure that your system is configured correctly.

James Sloan was a Visiting Research Fellow in Innosight Institute’s Education Practice in 2009. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in chemical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he graduated with highest honors. Sloan is employed currently as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.

Katherine Mackey is a Research Fellow in Innosight Institute’s Education Practice. Prior to joining Innosight Institute in September 2008, she was an eleventh-grade English teacher at Highland High School, a public high school in Utah. She worked previously as a designer at Houghton Mifflin Children’s Books. She is the co-author of a strategic five-year Academic Master Plan for Salt Lake Community College and has assisted with the formation and writing of professional development packets for the Utah State Office of Education. She has also worked as an intern for Senator Orrin G. Hatch for two summers.

Mackey holds a BA in English and French from Wellesley College and an MA in Education from Harvard University.

Michael B. Horn is the co-founder and Executive Director, Education of Innosight Institute, a not-for-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He is the coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill: June 2008) with Harvard Business School Professor and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson, president of the Citistates Group. BusinessWeek named the book one of the 10 Best Innovation & Design Books of 2008, Strategy + Business awarded it the best human capital book of 2008, Newsweek named it as the 14th book on its list of “Fifty Books for Our Times,” and the National Chamber Foundation named it first among its 10 “Books that Drive the Debate 2009.”

Disrupting Class uses the theories of disruptive innovation to identify the root causes of schools’ struggles and suggests a path forward to customize an education for every child in the way she learns. Horn has been a featured keynote speaker at many conferences including the Virtual School Symposium and Microsoft’s School of the Future World Summit.

Prior to this, Horn worked at America Online during its aol.com re-launch, and before that he served as David Gergen’s research assistant, where he tracked and wrote about politics and public policy. Horn has written articles for numerous publications, including Education Week, Forbes, the Boston Globe, and U.S. News & World Report. In addition, he has contributed research for Charles Ellis’ book, Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox (Wiley, 2006) and Barbara Kellerman’s Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Horn earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB from Yale University, where he graduated with distinction in History.

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Engaging Today's Digital Learners - Where Do We Begin?

noreply@blogger.com (Lucie deLaBruere) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:07:00 +0000

Ashley had just returned from a skating practice preparing for tomorrow’s skating competition, when I met her. So of course, we talked about skating, school, the latest movies, and other things ten year old girls talk about, including technology. As an educator, I was interested to hear about how she used technology at school, but she was more interested in talking about technology in her world outside of school – and I’m so glad she did.

I wasn’t surprised that Ashley likes digital photography, and that Ashley has her own blog, or that she spends time in a social network called WebKinz. But what I was surprised at was that she spends time in WebKinz with her grandpa. Ashley bought and mailed her grandpa a Webkinz and then helped him learn to navigate the world of Webkinz so they can play together. They can go over to each other's Webkinz houses and check out the new room decorations. Webkinz also has game rooms where they can meet to play online games. They can even send gifts and notes to each other through Webkinz post. Now that they have Webkinz in common, when they have a chance to visit, they talk about the latest Webkinz games or items they have purchased. They usually spend time together at the computer doing Webkinz. Her grandfather wasn't very tech savy and this gave him a way to share in Ashley's world.

We all know that technology can help grandparents and grandchildren who live hundreds of miles apart stay connected. I’m fortunate enough to have face to face playtime with my grandson in my basement filled with toys he loves. But for many, technology is the way kids and their grandparents stay connected. My grandson could answer a Skype call from great grandma when he was two. My mom learned to use Facebook so she could stay connected with her teenage grandchildren spread across the country. But it wasn’t until I met Ashley that I thought about playtime with grandpa happening on line. For those old enough to have a Facebook account, there are lots of ways to replicate the checkers game with gramps we remember from our childhood. But who would have thought about inviting gramps to your online playground?

Ashley’s brilliant solution of using technology to solve a challenge in her life, sent me off thinking about how often we look for ways to use technology in our classrooms that is limited by our awareness of the technologies available along with limited understanding of how today’s learners are truly different than those of previous years. How many of us try to find technologies that FIT into our way of teaching, instead of increasing our understanding of new ways kids who have grown up digital learn and interact with their world. What is our responsibility as educators to understand our new audience and learn new methods to reach this audience? I remember the first time a young lady with Asperger's Syndrome joined my class; her special educator provided me with materials about teaching kids with Asperger's Syndrome and I took my professional responsibility very seriously to increase my understanding of what learning was like for her. Infinite Thinking blogger, Julie Duffield, enlightened me about how technology can help us understand learners with autism. Most recently I rearranged the computer lab and installed new software to make it more accessible for a blind student in one of our fifth grade classes. His teachers and I are learning many new techniques (including new technologies) to make learning accessible for him.

But where do educators begin to increase their awareness of new learners, and of new technologies available to engage and reach those learners? Where do we begin to blend our content knowledge, our understanding of good teaching, with increased awareness of new technologies and new types of learners? Where do we find the time admist a teaching day jammed pack teaching children and fulfilling professional duties? I know very few teachers who don’t want to better understand today’s students or new ways to make learning relevant to them. Can we take this challenge to our students? Ashley found a very creative way , that very few adults would have thought of, to connect with her grandpa – I bet she was lots of ideas about how teachers can make learning relevant for her. Have we asked her for help in solving this challenge?

(P.S. I’d like to do a follow up post with ideas from readers about ways we can work on this challenge)

Mark Bauerlein Live Interview -- The Dumbest Generation

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:46:00 +0000

When: 21 Jan 2010
Time: 5:00pm Pacific (US) / 8:00pm Eastern (US) / 1:00am (Next Day) GMT
Duration: 1 hour
Event Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/49725
Direct Elluminate Session URL: http://tr.im/futureofed
The Elluminate room 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. The session will be recorded and the recording links will be posted here within a day of the event.

Join me this Wednesday for a live and interactive Future of Education interview of Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future.

Mark is Professor of English at Emory University, and has recently served as Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, as well as several scholarly studies of American literature, history, and philosophy. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, TLS, The Weekly Standard, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Dave Edyburn Live Interview Wednesday--Universal Design for Learning (CUE Series)

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:11:00 +0000

When: 20 Jan 2010
Time: 5:00pm Pacific (US) / 8:00pm Eastern (US) / 1:00am (Next Day) GMT
Duration: 1 hour
Event Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/49718
Direct Elluminate Session URL: http://tr.im/futureofed

The Elluminate room 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. The session will be recorded and the recording links will be posted here within a day of the event.

This Wednesday, Mike Lawrence and I interview Dave L. Edyburn, Ph.D., on Universal Design for Learning. This is the first of a series of Webinars organized by Computer-Using Educators (CUE) in advance of their 2010 Conference, March 4 - 6 in Palm Springs, California. (More information at CUE.org.) Dr. Edyburn will be a "Spotlight Speaker" at the conference.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is viewed as a promising service delivery model for helping students with disabilities achieve high academic standards in inclusive classrooms. Dr. Edyburn will introduce practical approaches to planning for diverse learners and will discuss specific strategies and resources, including:

Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning
http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/

National Center on Universal Design for Learning
http://www.udlcenter.org/

Free Technology Toolkit for UDL in All Classrooms
http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/

Dave L. Edyburn, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Exceptional Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dr. Edyburn's teaching and research interests focus on the use of technology to enhance teaching, learning, and performance. He has authored over 150 articles and book chapters on the use of technology in special education. His work spans the 36-page booklet, What Every Teacher Should Know About Assistive Technology (2003, Allyn & Bacon) to the 900-page Handbook of Special Education Technology Research and Practice (2005, Knowledge by Design). His work represents a variety of contributions to theory, research, and practice. He is the current President-elect of the Special Education Technology Special Interest Group (SETSIG) in the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) as well as a past president of the Technology and Media (TAM) Division of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC). He is a frequent conference presenter and national workshop leader.

Mike Lawrence has been impacting education as a Teacher, Speaker, Technology Coordinator and Director for more than fifteen years. He is a respected presenter at national conferences and events and was honored to be named an Apple Distinguished Educator in 2003. He also assisted in the development and launch of both the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) and the Google Teacher Academy programs. Mike is an author and editor and can often be found at his local coffee house on his laptop. He currently serves as Executive Director of Computer-Using Educators, supporting its California-based membership by advancing student achievement through technology on a national level. Each year, thousands of educators attend CUE’s conference events, making it the premier Educational Technology association of the Western US.

He began his educational career teaching high school English, often writing his own English elective courses to engage students typically disinterested in the core subject (Science Fiction Literature, anyone?). As a Technology Coordinator, he led delivery of all hands-on technology professional development, including Principal Training Programs for Southern California administrators, as well as the Student Technology Showcase and Technology Proficiency programs.

Mike’s humor and background as a teacher inform all of his presentations, making them accessible to educators of all levels and curricular areas. He lives with his wife Julie, son Jay, and daughter Kellen in Southern California.

[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]

Yong Zhao Live Interview Tomorrow: Catching Up or Leading the Way

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:22:00 +0000

When: 19 Jan 2010
Time: 5:00pm Pacific (US) / 8:00pm Eastern (US) / 1:00am (Next Day) GMT
Duration: 1 hour
Event Page: http://www.learncentral.org/node/49710
Direct Elluminate Session URL: http://tr.im/futureofed
Yong Zhao Web Page: http://zhao.educ.msu.edu/

Tomorrow, January 19th, I interview Yong Zhao, University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University on his book Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. This is part of the Future of Education interview series, is live and interactive session, and has an audience Q and A at the end.

Yong Zhao is University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also serves as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. He is a fellow of the International Academy for Education.

His research interests include computer gaming and education, diffusion of innovations, teacher adoption of technology, computer-assisted language learning, and globalization and education.

Zhao has extensive international experiences. He has consulted with government and educational agencies and spoken on educational issues in many countries on six continents. His current work focuses on designing 21st Century Schools in the context of globalization and the digital revolution.

Zhao was born in China’s Sichuan Province. He received his B.A. in English Language Education from Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing, China in 1986. After teaching English in China for six years, he came to Linfield College as a visiting scholar in 1992. He then began his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993. He received his A.M. in Education in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1996. He joined the faculty at MSU in 1996 after working as the Language Center Coordinator at Willamette University and a language specialist at Hamilton College.

The Elluminate room 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.

The session will be recorded and the recording links will be posted here within a day of the event.

[Cross-posted from http://www.SteveHargadon.com]

Implications of (almost) free online storage for educators and students

noreply@blogger.com (Wesley Fryer) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:03:00 +0000

Remember being amazed 1 GB flash media drives existed at all, because your mind was still used to thinking in MEGAbytes instead of GIGAbytes? Have you had the experience yet of seeing vendors at conferences give away 1+ GB flash drives with their free files and marketing content already loaded, because they are so cheap to produce? That was recent history, and it's a current event.

Now it's time to be amazed Google is giving anyone 1 GB of free online storage. As Mashable author Christina Warren points out, services like Dropbox and Box.net have been doing this for quite awhile. Drop.io continues to be one of my favorite online storage options, not only for its free/cheap cloud-based file access (depending on how much you want) but also its free phonecasting services. What does this abundance of free, online storage mean for teaching and learning today? It's time again to question some of our assumptions, and one of the big ones to question is the scarcity as well as cost of local as well as web-based storage space.

Just after the new year started, Karl Fisch tweeted me a link to Chris Anderson's June 2009 article, "Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity." In the article and his free eBook, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," Anderson contends:

When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world. The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce.

It may seem odd to think this way, but as the author of "The Long Tail," Chris Anderson is an important voice to consider in our quickly changing infoverse. If we want to act smart (and of course we all do most of the time) we need to change the way we look at online storage. Start thinking of storage space online as abundant rather than scarce. Here are a few implications of this thinking and the behaviors which should follow.

WIFI CONNECTIVITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER
The concept of cloud-based computing is a big shift for LOTS of people in our society today. Inside and outside our schools, ubiquitous access to our files and data "in the cloud" can be a great thing as long as we have available connectivity. This makes wifi hotspots in our schools, homes, and communities more important than ever. We don't need every city and town to be blanketed with high speed connectivity (although that would be nice, of course) but we DO need hot spots in each community which are readily accessible and FAST.

QUESTION MANDATES TO REQUIRE FLASH MEDIA DRIVES
Tomorrow I'm starting to teach a fifteen week course at the University of Central Oklahoma called, Technology 4 Teachers. In the past, and as far as I know in the other six sections of this course offered this term, students are required to purchase and use a 1 GB flash drive. In my sections, flash drives are optional. The vast majority of the work we'll do together this term will be "in the cloud." Why mess with a flash drive and a locally-saved file on a flash drive if you don't have to?

NETBOOKS LOOK BETTER EVERY DAY
Netbooks are perfect for cloud-based computing work. My comparison last week and weekend creating videos for YouTube using both iMovie '09 and Windows Live Moviemaker (for Windows 7 and Vista) confirmed what I'd long suspected: Today's 3rd generation netbooks can be used to produce creative multimedia videos as well as "work in the cloud." I think Storychasers' Mobile Learning Collaborative is right on target recommending that schools opt for netbooks rather than full-size laptops for 1:1 learning initiatives. The speed and power of netbooks are only going to increase in the months ahead, and the creative potential of cloud-based applications for learning is going to keep going the same direction as well.

ONLINE BACKUPS SHOULD BE A NO-BRAINER

As I mentioned a few days ago in the post, "Recovering lost iTunes Song Purchases (maybe) and iTunes Library Backups," online backup services are more affordable and user-friendly than ever. The English WikiPedia has a comparative table for different commercial online backup services worth checking out. If you're not backing up your vital files online yet (like me - I'm not and I need to do this) it's time to embrace online backups. Let's all learn from Kevin Honeycutt's "digital stroke" a few years ago (when his hard drive crashed WITHOUT a recent backup) and take some preventative steps TODAY that can avoid such agony.

A NEW AGE OF HOMEWORK ACCOUNTABILITY

Students can invent countless reasons for not turning in their homework on time. With web-based tools like wikis, Google Docs, and online learning management systems, course assignments can be not only shared/broadcast by the teacher/instructor for students and parents to access, they can also facilitate an entirely digital assignment submission process. The recent outbreak of the H1N1 virus in Hong Kong pushed some international school administrators to FINALLY require all their teachers to post assignments online. Snow days this winter in North America have raised similar questions in our own household: Why aren't all the teachers at my son's school posting assignments and accepting student work online yet? It's time for a new age of homework accountability to dawn.

INTERACTIVE PUBLISHING SHOULD BECOME NORMALIZED

Today it is rare to find a school which regularly empowers students to publish their work online for an audience of peers, parents, and other website visitors to review and offer feedback. The shift to cloud-based knowledge work can and should empower visionary school leaders (at all levels) to change this norm. Student motivation is of paramount importance for literacy development. If we don't help students get excited and intrinsically motivated to regularly engage in the activities of literacy, including reading, writing, and speaking in front of groups, we're failing as teachers. Rachel Boyd affirmed the power of parents and others responding to student work online in last Saturday's K12Online09 Week 2 fireside chat.

Want to help your students further develop their reading and writing skills? Find ways to help them become more motivated as readers and writers. Help them define their very identities as authors and publishers, for local as well as global audiences. Help them become storychasers.

What have I missed or do you think should be added to this list?

Cross-posted to Moving at the Speed of Creativity.

Technorati Tags:
backup, edtech, google, leadership, learning, online, school, vision, storage, box, net, boxnet, drop, drop.io

Future of Education Interview with Alan Michel from Home, Inc. Tonight

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:33:00 +0000

Date: 7 Jan 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific (US) / 8pm Eastern (US) / 1am (Next Day) GMT (International link)
Elluminate Session URL: http://tr.im/futureofed or here
Event Page: at LearnCentral.org

Tonight I interview Alan Michel, the Director, Co-Founder, and Board President of HOME, Inc., a media arts and education non–profit in Boston. Alan is currently running a media education program that reaches over 1,500 students in eleven schools in the Boston and Somerville Massachusetts school systems.

HOME, Inc. ("Here-in Our Motives Evolve") is a 30-year old, non-profit organization. Their mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of young people. They teach video production and media analysis to educators and youth to foster confident, creative, individuals with the ability to think for themselves. Their programs help students develop creative media projects that foster teamwork and communication skills. HOME's media projects and programs focus on teacher and student collaboration and the ability to effectively evaluate media messages, in order to enhance critical thinking skills. For HOME, the arts are a vital means of self-expression and a fundamental tool for stimulating lifelong learning.

Alan’s work in media and education includes the Get the Facts About AIDS campaign and prevention program in the Boston public Schools and other media projects. As the Principal Investigator for the Media and Health Project with the Boston Public Schools funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts, Alan develop the curriculum for media literacy professional development and project based learning at 5 Boston Public Schools, spearheaded partner relations with community groups, government, arts, education and scientific institutions and organizations and developed access to local and national media and telecommunications opportunities regionally. Alan is currently running a media education program that reaches over 1,500 students in eleven schools in the Boston and Somerville Massachusetts school systems.

The Elluminate room 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.

[Cross-posted from http://www.SteveHargadon.com]

My New Year's Wish - Let's Revisit COPPA

noreply@blogger.com (Lucie deLaBruere) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:40:00 +0000

Happy New Year! Tis the season for resolutions, reflection, and renewals. Every year about this time, I spend some time reflecting on the past year and thinking ahead to the new year. What worked well? What are my wishes for the new year? What resolutions do I have to make for those wishes to come true? It’s also a time of purging, organizing and letting go. As I clean closets and drawers and remove things that no longer fit my lifestyle, I make room for the new toys, exciting adventures, and increased possibilities in the new year.

This year I have a wish that would involve some purging and cleaning out of outdated regulations that are barriers to access to some of the wonderful learning tools available in a digital age.

Ten years ago, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act was created to protect children’s privacy. One of its goal is to prevent websites from collecting personal information from children under 13 without parental consent.

Although the need for protecting children’s privacy and safety has not changed, the way we live and learn online has changed in the past 10 years. Ten years ago, many feared that online shopping was unsafe; today more and more of us are not only shopping online, but also banking online. Not so long ago, many feared putting any private information on line; today more and more of us are using Facebook and other social networking sites to communicate with family and friends. Security and privacy are still very important issues, but new security measures and increased awareness about privacy settings have increased the functionality of the Internet as a tool throughout society. Why not encourage increased awareness of privacy and use security features available in online tools to protect children, rather than a blanket statement aimed at keeping children under 13 away from these tools.

Could it be that ten year old regulations aimed at protecting our children's privacy need to be updated? Wouldn’t the first year of a new decade be the perfect time to remove one of the barriers to using 21st century tools in today’s schools?
Photo by Giuseppe Bognanni taken from Diane Cordell's Blog Post Beyond the Wall

Website owners’s fear of noncompliance with COPPA has resulted in terms of service so complex and restrictive that they block the doorway to 21st century learning possibilities. COPPA states that websites are not allowed to collect private information from anyone under 13. It does not state the site cannot be used by members under 13 years old, but it does prevent the owners of those websites from collecting private information from those under 13 without parental permission. Since the owner of a website cannot prevent someone using their site from sharing identifying information in a post or profile, the easiest way to comply with this part of COPPA is to include an explicit statement that prohibits anyone under 13 from using their site. This creates several barriers.

It discourages (and usually prevents) the use of many valuable learning
resources from being used in today's 21st century classrooms.
It discourages teachers themselves from exploring and experiencing new ways of
learning and including many 21st century resources in the design of learning
experiences.
It stifles innovation in the design of learning. Few companies would invest in research and design of products that be challenged as noncompliant.

There are fabulous resources and opportunities for students to learn using online tools that are not available to children under 13 due to fear of non-compliance.

A group of middle school students and their teacher recently stumbled across the popular website Shelfari. The site allows you to “create a virtual shelf to show off your books, see what your friends are reading and discover new books”. The enthusiasm of students for reading and talking about reading is exactly what every teacher and librarian tries to foster in children. And yet, these children and their teacher’s desire to use Shelfari was met with a black and white statement on the sites’ privacy guidelines that prevented the teacher from moving forward her student’s request to create online bookshelves of the books they were reading. The statement “This Site is not intended for use by children under 13” was surely included by Shelfari’s lawyers to protect them from COPPA noncompliance. The children and their teacher looked for similar sites that would allow them access to similar 21st century learning tools for creating online bookshelves and discussions about reading. Two other similar sites, Library Thing and Good Reads included similar statements. Photo Credit: Mr. Allen's Class Blog

Surely COPPA was not aimed at sites that promote reading!

Even though, the law does allow children under 13 to participate with parental permission, many website owners do not have a vehicle for verifying parental consent, thus include the blanket (nobody under 13 statements) as the easiest way to comply with COPPA.

Considering the fact that research supports social learning, such as talking about books, and considering that we currently possess the technology to engage students using online learning tools, might it not be a good time to take a second look at COPPA and update it to allow website owners to make engaging tools available to K-8 students and still protect the privacy and safety of our children.

The Broadband Data Improvement Act S 1492 100th Congress Section 215 as already amended the legislation to require elementary and secondary schools with computer access to the Internet to educate minors about appropriate online behavior, including online interactions with other individuals in social networking websites and in chat rooms and cyberbullying awareness and response. Then why not also update legislations to make websites that promote learning a resource by which to educate our children.

Currrently a few websites have taken the lead in making their tools available to students. Sites like

Glogster (digital poster making)
Animoto (digital slideshows and videos)
Diigo (online bookmarking)
Voice Thread (digital conversations around artifacts)
PBworks (wiki with classroom accounts feature)
Google (k12 collaboration applications)

now offer features and classroom friendly acceptable use policies that support the use of their tools in education. They have turned the responsibility for verifying parental permissions and educating and supervising students to educators. They have added features that allow educators to monitor the behavior of their students and teach students how to be a safe and ethical digital citizen.

My wish for the New Year would be that we remove some of the barriers for students to learn using digital tools. Perhaps its time we take a second look at COPPA and revise it so it stops being a barrier to access to 21st century learning for our children. Surely this 10 year old regulations could use a facelift to reflect the realities of how we live and learn today. Could we not revise this regulation in such a way that would encourage website owners to create classroom friendly features of their website and encourage teachers to use exciting online tools to motivate student learning and shape the next generation of digital citizens.

Social Networking in Education - A Whitepaper

steve@hargadon.com (Steve Hargadon) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Educational Networking: The Important Role Web 2.0 Will Play in Education

[Cross-posted from www.SteveHargadon.com]