This afternoon I had the opportunity to connect up with a whole bunch of schools for a video conference from all around North Carolina put on the by the North Carolina Connectivity Council.  It was really cool.  We could see all of them and they could see us.  There should be an archive of the video posted soon.  Here is the excerpt from the announcement.  

The challenge for North Carolina educators is to ensure that every public school student graduates from high school, globally competitive for work and postsecondary education and prepared for life in the 21st Century.  Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites, provide students the opportunity to communicate, create and collaborate in new and exciting ways.  However, some educators and parents are concerned that these “just in time”technologies create an unsafe environment for our children.

Technology specialists from four NC school districts will describe their school systems’ approach to using Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.  Panelists will present the best practices from their respective districts while discussing the challenges of implementing these new technologies. 

Ideas from around North Carolina that Teacher are currently using that IS working:

• Teacher Created Wiki’s
• Teacher Created Blogs for Professional Development
• District Blog to model, share resources, and collaborate. 

Things Students are doing that is working.

• Green County Schools have a 1 to 1 laptop program.  (Wow)
• Student created Wiki’s – Creating based on the information that is created in class.  Do it in the class while the teacher is speaking. 
• Kids created blogs and commenting on other blogs. 
• Book Study through Wiki

Tools that People ARE using

• PBWiki (safer than Media Wiki and WetPaint)
• WikiSpaces (Private domain that is password protected)
• Blogger.com or EduBlogs
• Google Docs – Collaboration across district
• Teacher Tube (Block YouTube) (Use Tools to download YouTube if Teacher’s Want)
• DimDim – Collaboration
• Skype – Global Connections
• Animoto – Video Creation
• Glogster.com – Poster Creation
• Moodle - Learning Management System
• PRIVATE Ning Social Networking Group in School
• TakingItGlobal.org  - Place to find some collaborators for all sorts of subjects

Challenges

• Time on Task… there are a ton of kids online and it is hard to monitor what they are doing.  
• Social Networking (Teachers are no longer allowed to be friends with students in some schools… good idea.)
• Keeping Acceptable Use Policy up to date
• Time… there are so MANY tools… not enough time to address them all. 
• Expanding the global learning network so that learning can be global.   Finding people to collaborate with people around the world via Skype and other technologies above. 

Trainings for Teachers

I found it interesting that in many cases the instructional technologist are working with a group of teachers to train and prepare them to use this web 2.0 technology.  It is sometimes done as a monthly meeting, a mandated technology hour requirement, training classes, an annual fall conference, or using the web 2.0 technologies themselves.

• Shift Happens – Did you Know 2.0 - Used as a starting point for Faculty discussion.

He titled his presentation “Exploring the Construction Zone inside the Media Gap.”  I put the important stuff here, but he did a Google presentation that can be seen here that I would highly recommend. 

Theory Background – Like any good professor, he laid out some of the history back to the early 80’s when we started thinking about media and social media and communication.  It is interesting that we have been thinking about this since then.  He also lays out three laws that guide our progression of media to social media today.  He then moves into social media. 

Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” – Categories for publishing in the Media Gap

1. Sharing culture of Flickr
2. Collaborative nature of Wikipedia
3. Collective action of internet groupings, like the use of a Facebook group to force HSBC to reverse it’s decision on withdrawing students’ interest-free overdrafts.

How American Nerds Fill the Gap

This was really one of my favorite parts of the presentation.  He obviously spoke to me as a nerd, but also used traits of nerds to lay out the emergence of social media.  We as nerds have these strange weaknesses that are “engineered away’ ===> into 5 SuperPowers!

1. Attention Deficit Disorder ===> Multi-Tasking
2. Asperger inablity to get visual emotional cues ===> Text-based interactions replace human Face2Face.  Visual cues become emoticons ;->
3. Hyper-literality; jargon of the tasks and games ===> OMG!  Mainstreaming of our jargon into slang.
4. Friendless geeks ===> Redefining Friendship (Dunbar’s number)
5. Idiocentric Humor ===> The power of Internet memes; our shared mindspace.

Future of the Nerd

Someone asked about the future of the Nerd.  This is really a great question.  ”Nerds” have become mainstream.  Everyone is now using social media.  Everyone has 4000 friends on Facebook.  So what do you think?  What is the future of the Nerd?  What is our future?

Bibliography

Paul put together an AWESOME bibliography for anyone interested in social media.  This is fantastic.  He said it as okay to share so I thought I might post it here for y’all.  Thanks Paul!!

• Neuman, W. Russell. The Future of the Mass Audience. 1991 – Cambridge University Press New York.
• Moore, Gordon E. (1965). “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits” [PDF] Electronics April 19, 1965. See also Wikipedia
• Metcalfe, Robert. See Wikipedia 
• Gilder, George.  Metcalfe’s Law and Legacy. Forbes ASAP, September 13, 1993.
• Reed, David P. That Sneaky Exponential—Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building. Context. Spring 1999. See also Wikipedia
• Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody:  The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press (February 28, 2008). See also Shirky.com
• Nugent, Benjamin. American Nerd: The Story of My People. (Scribners, 2008). 
• Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. (University of California Press, 2006).  
• Kelty, Christopher. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. (Duke Press, 2008). Or online 
• Bumgarner, Brett. You have been poked: Exploring the uses and gratifications of Facebook among emerging adults. First Monday (Volume 12 Number 11 – 5 November 2007).
• Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), article 1. 
• Small, Gary and Gigi Vorgan. iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Collins Living (October 14, 2008)
•  Hamilton, Jon. Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again. Morning Edition, NPR. October 2, 2008.  
•  Granovetter, Mark S. Strength of Weak Ties. The American Journal of Sociology. 1973. The University of Chicago Press. 
• Tomita, Tetsuro. “The new electronic media and their place in the information market of the future” in Newspapers and Democracy: international essays on a changing medium. Anthony Smith, ed. MIT Press. 1980.
• Rushkoff, Douglas. Playing the Future: What We Can  Learn From Digital Kids. HarperCollins 1996.
• Boyd, danah and Mimi Ito. “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” November, 2008.

I ran across a great website called StudyBlue.com.  I have long been a fan of these types of websites and there are more than a few of them, but what makes this one really stick out in my mind is the ability for students to earn money.  I was one of those students that took copious notes and often shared my labors, notecards, and flashcards with other students in the class to help them out.  This not only helps make this easier, but it actually pays people for it too!  AWESOME!  What student can’t use a little extra food money?

This could really be useful for classes as they surf the internet… it might be easier than trying to get a whole class into second life… and a bit easier to remember… interesting.

Weblin is a service that allows people to have avatars that appear on the Web pages they visit and communicate with any other Weblin users who are visiting the same pages.

(Credit: Weblin)

If you’re a social media addict but think that visiting regular Web sites is a lonely experience, you might want to take a look at Weblin.

“I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. I believe that we cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower, and that even those of us who have spent time imagining this future will be astounded by what happens.”

He then goes through ten trends that are important for education and learning and seven steps we, as educators can take to make a difference.

Trends:

1. A New Publishing Revolution
2. A Tital Wave of Information (Great statistics on how this information is growing, but he encourages more creation… with good reason.)
3. Everything is Becoming Participative
4. The New Pro-sumers (combination of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’)
5. The Age of the Collaborator
6. An Explosion of Innovation
7. The World Gets Even Flatter and Faster
8. Social Learning Moves Toward Center Stage.  (I especially like this one.)
9. The Long Tail (Availability of specialization)
10. Social Networking Really Opens Up the Party

Steps we can Take:

1. Learn about Web 2.0
2. Lurk
3. Participate
4. Digest This Though: “The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.”
5. Teach Content Production
6. Make Education a Public Discussion
7. Help Build the New Playbook

What are your thoughts? Did you see this yesterday?

Ideas from the article:

• Class Chatter
• Classroom Community
• Get a Sense of the World
• Track a Word
• Track a Conference
• Instant Feedback
• Follow a Professional
• Follow a Famous Person
• Grammar
• Rule Based Writing
• Maximizing the Teachable Moment
• Public NotePad
• Writing Assignments

Another thing which may be of interest… 7 Things you should know about Twitter from Educause.

• Legality of using YouTube video’s
• Why we use them
• Tips for finding good video’s
• Ways to Download them locally
• Tools for Remixing them
• Ways to incorporate them into our teaching

A very interesting title… think about it. How can social bookmarking help students screen and use resources online to helping scholars collaborate about things that they think are important? What are the pedagogical implications of social bookmarking?

The tools that they are using is Blackboard Scholar. It is available as part of Blackboard LMS, or by itself… and all for FREE (Don’t you just love that word?)

• Getting students involved allows students to collaborate and contribute to the content of the course.
• The information they gather can become part of a lifelong learning effort that they can access later on as well.
• Used as a way for students to find resources that can be shared with the entire class.
• Thought: we should create tags for each of our classes. We can then search that tag online and find resources for that course forever (in theory).
• Social networking is a great way for students to find information and share it with the professor and other students.
• You can create a course page by creating an unique tag for the class and tagging any information with that tag.
• If students are not doing it already, they adapt very quickly. (Digital Natives)
• The Blackboard Module allows much more customization as well. (See Powerpoint for great examples). Each class can have certain tags as well for group projects.

How can we use Social Bookmarking:

• Personal Productivity
• Course Content
• Teamwork and Projects
• Professional Development
• Discovery, Tracking and Networking

Thoughts:

• This really is a great way to get the students collaborating and working together.
• In a way, social bookmarking is our way of annotating the web… at least organizing it in a way that is useful for each of us.
• I logged into our blackboard system and tried to find a way to add a social bookmarking module to our class, but I couldn’t find it… hmmm… anyone else know how to enable that on blackboard? Do the admin’s have to do that?

• This is a part of students life… the is the number one reason for why we are even considering this technologies.
• How do we social network… how do we socially engage with the students?
• What are those technologies we can endorse? Which ones don’t have anything to do with what we are doing?

Information:

• In the past we didn’t have as much information to filter, but today there are TONS of different sources of information! TONS! We have to find a way to filter that information.
• Students use a LOT of different sources simultaneously to find information.
• They are searching for as much information as possible… trying to find a common theme for all the sources!

So how do we and/or students filter that information?

We did a bunch of interactive learning activities (kudos to the presenters for keeping us awake!). One we divided into groups where we discussed what students want and what administrators can give them.

What Students Want:

• One stop shopping (find all the information we want)
• Text Messaging (when something is available)
• Some people said they want facebook. Admins can create a Facebook app… but then some students don’t want that! I am of the opinion that some would use it and some would not.
• Online Library Resources (ALL of THEM) 24 Hour Online Librarian to help navigate those resources!

• This one really makes me think… Google is going a long way with this with their Google Book Search, but we are lacking one crucial element… the ability to easily mark up that information. We are getting closer with Tablet PC’s, but you still have to download it locally… I want to mark up the web… not just digitally annotate it, but to ink annotate it… who is going to finally fill this hole? Who will step up to the plate to allow me to digitally ink the web (research) and index it for me to find later? (without downloading it locally… I can do that now…)

What can Administrators Offer:

• We can provide Facebook apps for those that want them.
• We can build virtual tours
• We can be open to new ideas and emerging technologies… especially social technologies. Collaboration is a HUGE part of education!

What is it that we need to provide as an IT service on campus and when do we need to just get out of the way? Don’t replicate what they already have!

We didn’t leave this session with too many ideas… at least not concrete ideas. What are you using Social Networking for? I know we have a UNC Libraries Facebook App that some students use, but I have never used it inside of
Facebook. I wonder if any students do use it… Other ideas?