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?

Last week I linked to a great article about using Twitter in the classroom.  Today I saw a new service that is in Beta right now that is a twitter-like web app specifically designed for the Classroom…  Edmodo.  I was not able to get in, but you can see some screenshots here. 

It promises to be the service to connect schools, teachers, parents and students. 

Instant communication and connection is a great thing and if a whole school buys into something like this it could be fantastically popular and useful, but you will lose the greater Twitter community which is part of the power of Twitter. 

Aside from being a huge Google fan, this could potentially be important in Education for one reason… users. YouTube has a HUGE user base.

A lot of teachers are already familiar with YouTube and will be more likely to start using a feature in a program they already use. I need not repeat the value of live streaming for a classroom. Teachers can teach for distance education, not to mention a global audience! With real time feedback tools like chat and twitter, teachers can also get real time feedback from around the world!

Students will also find a much larger user base to present to.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. What about you? What other things can you think of?

This morning I received a chat invitation from a Philippe Dewost, a young guy from France, who was reading a popular post from about a year ago: “8 Ways to use Camera Phones in Education.“  Philippe is a the guy behind, or at least a part of a cool program called Qipit that I thought might be of use to some of you out there. 

Functionality

Basically it allows students/teachers to take a pictures of notes/whiteboards/etc. and email them to a service that converts them over to PDF.  It actually works pretty good.  It takes out all the ugly from the picture and makes a pretty good copy of what ever you are seeing (but it does have to be large). 

Cons

• Multiple pages is somewhat hard.  You can do it by attaching multiple pictures to an e-mail, but that is difficult on a phone.  From what I can see there is no way to edit it once it has been sent and combine pictures together.

• UPDATE: Qipit does offer a “merge” feature that allows to reorder your pages and combine them in a single PDF. For multiple uploads we also offer an HTTP uploader (10 pages at a time, including pre scanning page rotate) so you can unload your cell phone using bluetooth and upload at once to Qipit

• UPDATE: The 100 page limit is an online storage limit.  You always receive your qipit copies by e-mail.

Uses

The uses in education are obvious.  Students can scan in hand written notes and share them easily with friends (and save paper!).  Teacher’s can scan in notes from class on a board they want to remember… or even assignments. 

What other uses can you think of?  There is a Facebook group devoted Qipit too…

So, what do you do?  Use your laptop!   Yesterday I read a great article on Lifehacker about doubling your reading speed. They introduced three new programs to me that will flash words on a screen at a high rate. 

• ZAP Reader
• Spreeder
• WordFlashReader (You don’t have to be online for this one)

Why this is Better than books!

To me, this is using technology to help us.  So often we look down at reading online, but this would actually be BETTER than a regular book because it keeps your undivided attention.  And I know we can all read faster than we do, when we have to. 

Of course, if your goal is to ENJOY the book… this might not be the best solution…

Personal Experience

When I was in grad school I had to read LARGE books, and several a week.  When I was drowning in stuff to do, I found a way to download books on my palm pilot and using the auto scroll feature read entire books in half the time it would normally take me.  I have not tried these particular programs yet, but I can imagine how awesome this would be. 

Has anyone else out there tried using these programs?  What about another program?  What other ideas do you have for making reading online easier?  Do share your thoughts in the comments section!

Now your second life can become a bigger part of your first life.

I read about a new Firefox extension today called gTranslate.  It allows you to select text on any page and translate it to any of the languages that GoogleTranslate supports.  Awesome!