Nexus

The neat thing about edubloggers is that they don’t just write about “stuff” after it happens; they get out there, jump in with both feet and try things. We’re all geared up for the K12 Online Conference and its theme of Playing with Boundaries seems to have hit home with many of us, as that’s exactly what we’ve been doing the past few days. There have been several opportunities this week to push the boundaries of professional learning by experimenting with social networking tools such as UStream TV.

Checking my Google Reader Friday morning led me to an invitation from Vicki Davis to virtually attend her sessions that day at the MAINEducation 2007 Technology Conference. She invited us to “pull up the stream [on UStream TV] and then follow along in the Google presentation“. I decided to accept the invitation and take the opportunity to “learn over the shoulders” of the participants in the Blogging for a Better Classroom presentation.

Having had a few experiences watching Will Richardson, David Jakes, Dean Shareski, IJohn Pederson and others play with UStream TV and Operator11 earlier in the week, I thought I knew what to expect - audio and video from the presentation and a running chat with the other viewers/listeners. Vicki’s expert use of UStream blew me away! She confidently and expertly handled the technology and skillfully drew those of us on the outside into the group, as though she’d been presenting this way for years. There are several factors which made Vicki’s presentation so successful.

1. The use of the UStream TV tool was planned by the presenter and not spring upon the presenter. Earlier on Friday I watched David Warlick’s presentation in Webster, Wisconsin courtesy of IJohn Pederson’s broadcast through UStream TV. Although David was made aware that IJohn was broadcasting, he hadn’t planned for the broadcast to be integrated into his presentation. Those of us “on the outside” never joined the group “on the inside”. Vicki on the other hand invited us, acknowledged our presence, welcomed us, encouraged her face to face participants to join us in the backchannel, and planned for ways for us to be drawn into the F2F group.
2. The viewers/listeners, (back channelers), were drawn into the presentation in a meaningful way. For instance, right off the bat, we were invited to drop links to our own blogs in the backchannel chat. Rather than talking about teachers who blog, Vicki brought us along and immediately connected the session participants to our blogs. There were other opportunities for us to add to the presentation, e.g. “Tell us how you are handling comments on your blogs”.
3. Vicki assigned what she called a “Backchannel Bouncer”, (sorry Vicki, I don’t care for the term), to watch the backchannel, welcome the participants, summarize responses to the presenter’s questions, and report back comments or questions that should be addressed. This role which was played expertly by Cheryl Oakes, is essential for managing the communication flow!

Here’s a snapshot of the session.

I went in intending to “learn over the shoulders” of the participants. Instead I found myself actively engaged with the group - all without leaving my desk. How’s that for playing with boundaries?

Technorati tags: education, edubloggers, blogging, UStream TV, backchanneling, Vicki Davis, David Warlick, K12 Online Conference, k12online07

What images come to mind when you think of a fireside chat? Crackling fire? Intimate group of friends or colleagues? Stimulating conversation? Laughter? Companionship? Glass of wine (or other libation)?

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending the K12 Online Conference - Fireside Chat with David Warlick. What a treat!

Crackling fire? No, but picture all of the participants cozied up to their desktops/laptops/PDA’s etc.

Intimate group of friends or colleagues? Not exactly. How about 100+ educators from…Prince Edward Island, South Carolina, New Brunswick, California, Oklahoma, New Jersey, New York, Sudan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Australia, Michigan, British Columbia, Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, Texas, Manitoba, Korea, Illinois, New Zealand, North Carolina, Arizona, Ontario, Scotland, Mexico, Kansas, Quebec, and Maryland, (my apologies if I’ve left anyone out), gathered together online irrespective of time zones and geographic distance? Not exactly an intimate group, but there was a very warm feeling of collegiality.

Stimulating conversation? You bet! And for those of us whose brains have been wired in a more or less linear fashion over the past few decades, a mental workout! The chat flew by on the screen like snippets of conversation in a crowded room, competing with the audio and video being presented elsewhere on the screen.

Screenshot of David Warlick’s Fireside Chat

Laughter? Yes, and other social conventions you would associate with a face to face conversation - greetings, informal chitchat, asides, questions, interjections etc.

Companionship? Yes, evident by the fact that people were drawn to the event. It wasn’t necessary to attend the live chat in order to understand Warlick’s keynote address, Inventing the New Boundaries, yet there we were, more than 100 of us from around the world. We are by nature social creatures and need contact with others. We are coming to the realization that we not only socialize, but also learn in networks. Teaching has longtime been a solitary, sometimes even lonely, profession. We spend most of our days, not in the company of professional colleagues, but in a four-walled room with our students. Having the opportunity to quickly and easily reach out to colleagues is very empowering. In blogging about his keynote session David Warlick wrote:

The session was installed and opened around 7:30 yesterday. Part of that web page were instructions for using a chat program to discuss the opening presentation as people were watching it. During the first few minutes, messages appeared from the U.S., Korea, SecondLife (that was me), Australia, Thailand, and The Philippines.

I can think of nothing that illustrates the changing boundaries of our teaching and learning environments than this. In almost 24 hours, 2,539 messages were posted to that chat room.

We are discovering the power of the network in droves.

So, what did I take away from this experience?

• Affirmation that I am a member of a professional learning community, that there are colleagues upon whom I can call (twitter, skype, comment…) to help me or act as a sounding board.
• An appreciation of the skillset that students bring to the classroom, the ability to communicate in non-linear fashions.
• Experience using one of the many tools, (Elluminate), available to us for online collaboration.
• An appreciation of key roles that must be played in order to reign in chaos.
  • The first is facilitator. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach played this role during the session and she is incredibly skilled at it. We have much to learn from her.
  • Conversation rudder. Wesley Fryer played this role expertly. If you read through the chat, you’ll see him updating the group on points made by the speaker, restating key points, reframing questions…
• Increase in comfort level in participating in environments that have new boundaries.

Technorati tags: k12online07pc, k12online07, David Warlick, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Wesley Fryer, K12 Online Conference 2007

Image Citation
Superciliousness. “200510 fireside chat.” superciliousness’ photostream. 30 October 2005. 10 Aug 2007 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/superciliousness/57898245/>.

David Warlick, consummate story-teller and king of the metaphor has done it again - kicked off the K12 Online Conference in style - entertaining, engaging, stimulating, and challenging us to “Invent the New Boundaries“. The video takes a while to download but is well worth the wait. The audio file of course downloads faster. Use it for your second listen; you’ve got to watch the video!

Warlick states that he is not comfortable using this video style of presentation in the absence of feedback from a live audience. I have to say his stated discomfort is not evident to the viewer; he seems completely at ease in front of the camera, setting up his shots in interesting locations, engaging even bystanders. I admire Warlick for continually pushing, breaking down and re-inventing the boundaries. He reminds us, not in words, but through his actions that we need to move beyond our comfort level in order to explore our personal boundaries.

I think that at least on an theoretical, if not practical level, most educators would agree that the nature of learning is changing in the information age and the traditional school boundaries are disappearing. Warlick outlines for us three new conditions that are converging in our classrooms, which have the potential to be the new boundaries off of which we can gain needed traction to move learning forward. There were quite a few attention-grabbing ideas here for me!

Condition #1

Students are more info-savvy. They are accustomed to rich information experiences, connecting with the world through “invisible tentacles” in the form of multimedia, mobile phones, video games, and social networks. They look to a network of people who can help them learn what they need/want to do.

In rather graphic terms, Warlick asserts that in schools we are “chopping the tentacles off…because we want our children to be the students we want to teach, rather than teaching the students that they are.” Wow, puts a whole new spin on all of the filtering, blocking and banning we are doing!

Condition #2

There is a new information landscape. On a daily basis all of us must make decisions as to what information we are going to use. Warlick states: “In the information age, information must compete for attention…in exactly the same way products on the shelves competed for attention in the industrial age.” I hadn’t thought of it in this way but it concerns me. I see lots of evidence that students are being swayed by “glitzy packaging”.

Condition #3

We are preparing students for an unpredictable future. Very tough assignment!

There are so many conversation starters in Warlick’s presentation and there are a number of ways to get involved. If you blog, tag your posts k12online07pc. Do a blog search for that tag on Technorati and join the conversations that resonate with you. David has started a wiki and invited all of us to edit the pages to comment and join the discussion as he fleshes out the concepts. I for one intend to take him up on the invitation!

Technorati tags: k12online07pc, k12online07, Warlick, K12 Online Conference 2007

I am a passionate learner. Never am I more energized than when I am learning and contributing to the learning of others. Having said that, I rarely get as excited about organized professional development opportunities as I am about the K12 Online Conference set to start tomorrow, October 8, 2007!

Last year’s conference completely changed the way I look at PD. Never again will I sit through a one-off “sit and git” presentation.

For me the conference started off with a real eye-opener in David Warlick’s Keynote, Derailing Education: Taking Sidetrips for Learning. In his opening remarks Warlick stated:

You’ll spend some time paying attention to me and others, but the best part of this conference will be the time that you are reflecting on what you see, hear, and read, and then writing in your blogs and populating wikis, and then reading other people’s reflections, and reacting.

How true! I was enthralled by the video/podcast format that allowed me to pause, stop, restart and replay the keynote presentation as needed. I spent a remarkable day working through the one hour presentation as I engaged in my own learning sidetrips:

• I paused the podcast and explored the links to Blogger and Edublogs. I set up accounts at both and “played” for a bit.
• Back to the presentation…
• Paused again, this time to explore Bloglines. Found several interesting feeds there to which I subscribed. I wasn’t sure at that point whether or not I needed an RSS Reader; man, have I come a long way in a short year :-).
• Stopped, this time to get some work done…hate it when that happens…
• Back to the presentation, …paused at conference HitchHikr. Wow! I’d never seen this application before. Spent a long time exploring the related blog posts and cloud tags. I made connections to bloggers I’m still reading.
• And then there was the keynote wiki! At that point I was aware of Wikipedia, but I’d never seen a wiki used in any other context. I spent a long time there, exploring the wiki interface, following the links, but most importantly reading and reflecting on the comments left by other participants who were also taking their own sidetrips through Warlick’s presentation.

What a thrill! And that was just one keynote from a packed conference agenda!

This year’s conference promises to be just as exciting. Here’s the welcome message from the conference wiki:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is Playing with Boundaries. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote by David Warlick the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

I’m so looking forward to this year’s conference. The theme, “Playing with Boundaries” is very à propos given what we’ve all learned this past year about active participation through all of the back-channelling, sharing, blogging, tagging, and twittering activities in which we’ve been involved. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada; so there’s no need to start the day with my nose to the grindstone. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the day than David Warlick’s keynote. If you can’t “make it” tomorrow, don’t worry…enjoy the presentation when it best suits your schedule. The conversation will continue long after the event; just join in when you’re ready! See you there!

Technorati tags: K12 Online Conference 2007, k12online07, k12online07pc, David Warlick, professional learning

On her blog, Musings about Using Technology as a Tool for Learning, Sharon Peters talked recently about the “evolution of the über-blogger“.

I love the phrase, “uber-blogger”, and wish I’d thought of it. The following is based on a comment I made to Sharon’s original post. It (my comment) seems to have vanished into the blogosphere, but I thought it was worth writing, so I’ve added to it and posted it here instead.

I wasn’t sure what to call this phenomenon, but it is extremely powerful! I first witnessed it during NECC 2007. I was only able to physically attend the Edubloggercon immediately before the NECC conference and then had to return home. Once home, I used my RSS reader to follow the rest of the conference. One of the first feeds I pulled in was a skype chat posted on Jeff Utecht’s blog, from the Skype conversation held during Will Richardson’s presentation, “From Hand It In to Publish It: Re-Envisioning Our Classrooms“. This just blew my mind! There were eleven people involved in this conversation. Some of the participants were physically present in Will’s presentation; others were “skyped in” from elsewhere.

In itself it is extremely valuable to read the notes and interpretations of edubloggers who so freely share from the conference sessions they attend. But to see the conversation that took place among that group of skypers during Will’s presentation was extraordinary! It added so much depth to what was already an outstanding presentation conference session. To get a feel for yourself, try this:

• Open Will’s wiki page and follow his session outline;
• Listen to the podcast of the session posted by Wesley Fryer;
• Follow the skype notes posted by Jeff Utecht.

Do you get the same sense of “Wow!” that I do? This is blogging on a new level, hence uber-blogging.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, I was travelling last week in Saskatchewan and following the Building Learning Communities conference being held in Boston. As I followed the conference via Google reader, I found that the backchanelling activities started at NECC not only continued, but flourished. Cathy Nelson wrote about her experiences taking part in BLC07 sessions by skyping David Jakes. Just search her blog for BLC and you’ll see the incredible impact this type of participatory activity had on her professional learning - and she didn’t physically attend the conference!

I also noticed that the uber-bloggers were honing their new skills. David Jakes in my mind is becoming a master at facilitating backchannelling sessions. Here’s a good example. David “hosted” the skype chat for Ewan McIntosh’s session - Is Your Public Body Public? Read through the chatcast and you’ll notice David played a role beyond conversation participant. He facilitated the chat by:

• reminding readers/skypers of the session title
• articulating main points as they were introduced by the presenter
• summarizing main points
• clarifying skypers’ comments

Last but not least David added a few text conventions such as italics to make it easier for the rest of us to follow.

Call it what you will - uber-blogging, backchanelling, whatever, there’s a lot to think about here and I know I need some more processing time. I need to think about this from different perspectives: professional development leader, project designer and facilitator, teacher, learner…

Right now though, I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all of the uber-bloggers who so willingly and effectively share these rich learning experiences!

Technorati tags: blogging uber-blogging NECC07 NECC2007 NECC 2007 NECC 07 BLC07 BLC 07 BLC2007 BLC 2007

Here I am in sunny Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, accompanying my husband at his national optometric conference. Before me lies the gift of four days to do as I please! Of course I’m going to explore the city, shop, and walk the beautiful trails along the Saskatechewan River that runs through the city. I brought along my PDA so I can check e-mail, approve registrations on our ISS07 project and keep up with my Google Reader feeds. But since there is only so much shopping and walking you can do, (seriously), I thought I’d also “attend” a conference.

The Building Communities Conference is currently being held in Boston. Not an easy commute from Saskatechewan! No worry, I’m using my RSS aggregator (Google Reader) to bring the conference to me. This is the power of tagging! Bloggers who are attending the conference are tagging their posts with either blc07, blc 07, blc2007 or blc 2007. All I need to do is use a blog search engine to search for those tags. I like Google Blog Search because it integrates seemlessly with my Google Reader and displays nicely on my small PDA screen. Since I can read my Google Reader RSS feeds offline, once I’ve downloaded them to my PDA, I can browse through the blog posts about the conference from park benches as I stroll along this beautiful river. Now that’s the way to attend a conference!

I could put links here to all the things I’m learning, to share with anyone who might be reading this post. But you know what, I’m not going to. This is my learning - personal, and highly effective for me! From David Jakes’ invitation to be skyped into sessions, to Ewan McIntosh’s invitation to get a free front row view of the conference, complete with vidcasts and podcasts from his blog, I feel personally invited to pull in these feeds, digest them at my leisure, and make my own connections and meaning from the conference. This is professional learning that works for me:

• pulled in from the network of edubloggers I’ve been reading and interacting with
• accessible anywhere, at any time
• interactive, as I can post comments on the blogs where the writer has made points that resonate with me.

I encourage you to take charge of your own professional learning. Fire up the RSS reader of your choice and immerse yourself in the ideas and issues that matter to you.

Now, I’m off to explore the Saskatechewan River!

Technorati tags: blc07 blc 07 blc2007 blc 2007 professional learning