Musings ...

Here are a few things that have come across my radar but haven't quite made it to full post status. Enjoy ...
Feb 16
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After a decade of inroads, SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences

I am not able to post this, I’m becoming disillusioned with Tumblr.  Perhaps it’s too long.  It keeps disappearing.  At least after the first time I backed it up.  I’m going to put it at a wiki instead … hours wasted posting, watching it vanish …

Moved to http://aace2009vance.pbwiki.com ===>

The above document points to all the online conferences I’ve been involved in since I first started going online with language students and teaching peers over a dozen years ago.

Also drafting at http://tinyurl.com/aace-vance

Now piecing it back bit by by bit, I need to bend all this experience around this ABSTRACT: The presenter has been a long-time advocate and agitator for broadcasting online both into and out of on-site professional development events and conferences. The presenter describes inroads made during the past decade from 1999 to the present in making conferences accessible to many more than just their physically present delegates. Having debunked the myth that if conferences were open to online access on-site attendance would drop off, a case is made for the opposite scenario: that broadening channels for conversation at conference venues is a win-win situation in which everyone benefits, and conferences where these channels are blocked are the dinosaurs doomed to extinction.

Now, what do I want to say?

My thesis occurred to me on my way to work this morning. I’m teaching a course on multiliteracies. I was thinking of the video we’ve all seen on YouTube, HelpDesk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pyjRj3UMRM. A man in medieval robes can’t figure out to work the new technology, so someone comes in and shows him how to turn the pages of this new ‘book’. Once he’s got it, helpdesk is about to go, but then he says, wait, now I’m on the wrong page, how do I go back? Helpdesk shows him the pages can be turned in BOTH directions. Aha moment!

Since the middle ages there has been a literacy out there rooted in print literacy that is steeped in legitimacy and refereed. Largely written by PhDs, published in hard copy, stringently researched, all the I’s dotted and t’s crossed, competitive, controlled (meaning driven top down), and for the most part well worth reading, a major source of our knowledge, and it underpins most of what we do in our practice. Much of it is stored in libraries and available in bookstores, even online via Amazon and Kindle. But is it truly accessible?

For many of us, not really.  In this day of information overload and twitch speed, we lack the time at leisure to sit and focus on print media. Enter another literacy. Did I mention this came to me on my way to work? Was I reading? Depends on how you commute; in my case I was driving - 40 minutes each way, an hour and a half in my day. Not much on the radio, sometimes BBC but at other times pop music. So I listen to podcasts. After work if I go home and run, that’s another hour I can spend engaged in activities I would be doing anyway AND absorbing this alternate literacy. This is one solution to remaining up-to-date and literate for people who don’t have time to read.

I was listening to It’s Elementary #28 http://edtechtalk.com/node/3495 on the EdTechTalk channel of http://worldbridges.net. Chris Lehman, principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, was relating how he came to put on the EduCon 2.1 unconference http://educon21.wikispaces.com/. He was at another conference where someone had said they were thinking of organizing such an event and Will Richardson said to Chris that he should do that using the resources of his progressive school.  Chris said yeah, sure, and probably sent out a few seed emails.  A month later there didn’t seem to be much interest, it was dawning on him how much work it would be and was it really a viable project, and he was thinking of canceling the idea.  Then he heard from Jon Pederson in Japan who wrote to tell him he’d just bought his plane ticket.  And so he went through with it, and that’s how these things just … happen.

Also on the program on It’s Elementary #28 were Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, organizers of The Flat Classroom Project which had Thomas Friedman taking questions from students in Qatar.  This event was featured because it happened to be planned to coincide with EduCon 2.1 (Thomas Friedman’s availability was the prime consideration). Here was another conference started spontaneously, by people just doing it, Edupunk-style, and hooking their students, in Qatar of all places, up with the author of The World is Flat.

EduCon 2.1 was a well-attended face to face event, not free but it produced a wealth of materials including recordings of all sessions that are freely available online (sadly, many session recordings were ‘lost’ this time around).  These materials now reside online and are available for download and listening.  Similarly, there have been two K-12 online conferences by now http://k12onlineconference.org/.  Again, these have resulted in a wealth of audio and video resources which can be downloaded on subscription to RSS feeds.  There have been two WiAOC conferences now http://wiaoc.org, both of which can essentially be revisited through the recordings which remain online from 2005 and 2007 (and the next one is in May 2009, being organized as we speak). George Siemens has organized some excellent conferences, I’ve subscribed to the podcasts, and I believe I’ve listened to every talk in every one.

(Jon wrote one of the first handbooks for teachers on Using Del.icio.us in Education: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s; Will Richardson has pioneered pedagogical uses of blogging and managing class work through RSS feeds).

RSS and aggregators; excellent resources from Will Richardson …

Noam Chomsky was on last night as a guest of Lancelot Schools.  Teachers in Heike Philp’s network were invited to attend and talk to Noam, or pose questions in advance. Noam has had a blog for a long time and

This is the literacy of those who don’t have time to read books. Dave Cormier asked something very telling on one of his shows recently. Has any one of you read Thomas Freedman’s The World is Flat? I mean from cover-to-cover all the way through. No one had. We’ve all read enough to get the gyst. Most of us reached the point where he seems to be repeating himself, we got the message, we blogged about it, it comes up a lot in CONVERSATION, but few in that particular podcast audience, if anyone, had actually READ the book all the way through. And these were all people you would expect had (including me ;-).

There was a show on On the Media last year about War and Peace. The question explored on the program was, has anyone really read it? This is interesting to me, because I DID read that book, all the way through, at a time in my life when I was into Russian authors. It was a time in life when I had more time, when I used to go to the beach a lot and take books there to read. Life back then was not one steady stream of email, or RSS feeds (however you get your media hit). Back then you could write a book chapter, send it off, and relax and not think about it till you got a reply about it a month later. Nowadays, who has time for

Face to face conferences are of that era. It was a time of rigor and was fixed in a mindset that mitigated to retain that rigor. This produced a panoply of literary heros, popular writers and scholars with the intellectual and interpersonal skills (you had to sidle up to publishers) to get published. The long tail had no voice, was left out of the conversation. What’s happening now, the Long Tail is Fighting Back.

And it’s not doing it through print literacy.

Structuring educational environments like SL. Set up a display, it gets full of people who interact. It has its moment. Everyone leaves. The display is still there. Go back later, you’re alone, but you can explore, absorb. Go back with a friend …

Let’s go back to the dark ages … well they weren’t completely dark, I had been working with students and other teachers online since we started Webheads in 1997 and by 1999 we had a community formed around an online class we called Writing for Webheads.  I was regularly attending TESOL conferences back then and though people were talking enthusiastically there ABOUT using the Internet, they were hardly able to demonstrate what they were doing because it was so difficult and expensive to get a phone line into a presentation room to go online with AOL or something.  There was one way that you could get a connection back then, and that was by becoming a part of an Internet Faire. TESOL arranged at its expense for the Electronic Village to have Internet access and if you managed to get a presentation accepted here you could use it for your presentation.  So in 1999 I convinced our group of students and teachers who had been meeting online at noon GMT each Sunday that it would be fun to meet in the same place during the hour I would be demonstrating what we did there at the TESOL conference.

Now the interesting thing about this is that we were at that time just learning about online communities.  The fact that people could meet others online that they didn’t even KNOW and accomplish something like help each other learn - students wanted to learn English, teachers wanted to know what worked in the online environment.  The issue of pictures .. when I asked at first if people would send them to me, they were quite hesitant.  Eventually someone did and I put it on our website.  Someone else sent one and I had two.  Then a couple more, and soonmany were willing to send a pic and we had a gallery.  We met regularly but now we knew a little more about each other, we had faces.

But this was still an anonymous environment.  Would people here keep commitments?  If I wrote my peers and proposed they give me a cherished slot at an Internet faire which was in one of the only rooms at this conference hotel in New York where you could go online, would these people I didn’t actually know show up?  Or would I be sitting there looking stupid and making excuses.  We didn’t know back then.  This was ten years ago.  We were surprisedback then when things happened on cue over the Internet.  But my friends showed up and chatted with me at the Palace, and conference-goers stopped by and looked interested. Maggi and Michael both appeared at the Palace and chatted with passers- by. Student reactions:
* Vance: I am really happy for you! It’s glad to know that you can present what we have done in the web. I really appreciate what you have done for us! - Hilda
* I am so happy to have you my teacher and my web page to be used at the TESOL conference. Best luck for your speech at conference. See you around. Choi Hae-Young. Mar03, 1999