TLt Summit - Our First Life - Technology for Important Things

Richard Schwier - Keynote Presentation

Within my first days as an employee at the University of Saskatchewan, I was hearing Rick Schwier's name mentioned a lot. He is a much respected (loved, really), published and awarded professor of educational communications and technology at this institution. By all accounts, he has also been significantly influential in the lives and careers of a new generation of leaders in the fields of educational technology and instructional design. When I finally had the opportunity to meet Rick, all of the good things I'd heard about him made sense, he was smart engaging, genuine, and nice.

Rick's presentation was given at the banquet on Thursday night. Because I was at home with my son I thought I would just tune in via Ustream, unfortunately technology was not on my side, so I wasn't getting any video or audio. I was able to login to the chat, where I found 30 devotees watching, listening, connecting and making insightful and amusing observations. It was apparent by the playful banter that some in this group were already part of a network of ed techs who knew each other, and some were not, but all were welcome. This is common, to welcome new people and those on the periphery. There is a general sense of openness and sharing. I very much appreciate this, coming from the business world of technology, during my technology career having always worked on the web and with open source, and being a BarCamp organizer. It's been great to feel like I already fit, like I can connect with people who have similar goals and philosophies. Openness, sharing, connecting, communicating; I've tried to conduct my work by these principals and I've seen them lead to stronger teams, successful projects and peaceful working environments, and as I connect with these people it almost feels like we already know each other. It's a very cool thing.

Rick talks about technology for important things. For me, technology is ubiquitous so his advice is a reminder of how to live better; regardless of the technological implications - these concepts apply to life in general. I thought everything Rick said was relevant and meaningful, but there are a few things I want to discuss because they really hit home.

Slow Down
A certain amount of stress is productive, but too much leads to distress, which is nonproductive and not healthy. He talks about those people who are always "too busy". Well, that would be me. I tend to function at a fairly high level of stress and busyness, even at rest - there is much to think about doing. I often fall into the trap of attempting to "multi-task" and to do it quickly, even though I know that when I take the time to slow down and focus on one thing at a time, I am much more effective and get better results... for example:

Yesterday, I was at a session where I was listening to the presenter, tweeting, blogging the session, emailing for work, and had one ear bud in trying to listen to another presentation being Ustreamed. Ahem. Yes, you read that right.

Realizing the complete ridiculousness of what I was attempting to do (all at the same time) and feeling embarrassed enough to try focus my efforts I took some steps to pare down my activities. First, I had to take out the ear bud because I couldn't listen to the audio at the same time as the presenter, my mind was getting all jumbled, neither was making sense so I had to abandon one. Then I stopped the tweets and the emailing because my mind was wandering as I was blogging, and if you asked me right now what the session I was in was about I wouldn't be able to tell you without referring to my own blog! So, there you go. Slow down and do one thing at a time. It will lead to less distress and hopefully more learning, a more enjoyable process and a better end product.

Be Mindful
Rick talked about being mindful. I love the concept of mindfulness, and I always have since I read Ellen Langer's book on the subject for a psychology class way back in the day. Since then I've done some yoga and meditation, and there's really nothing like it to consciously and with real awareness bring calm and focus to the mind. It makes sense that a mind in this state would be primed for learning too.

Turn Away
We get overwhelmed when we think of all of the horrible things happening in the world and we have so much access to it. Rick wisely suggests turning away from disturbing things that we can't change. I am so bad. I intentionally titillate myself with crap content online and it just makes me stabby or depressed, and I fully know better. Sometimes I try to justify it to myself by thinking that I'll just check this for fun or just for a second, but it never ends up as fun or for a short time. I'm better off without foxnews.com, parentsbehavingbadly.com or perezhilton.com.

Find Your Way
Which brings us to the importance of failure in learning or "finding your way". It's only true that we learn through our mistakes and I have learned through my own failures that it is okay to fail, in fact it is necessary to fail in order to grow. I think that this is really important to remember as we find our way through a revolution of sorts, to allow it to be okay not to succeed or be perfect, especially the first time we try or do something new. The important part is to try and do, so what if you fail? You'll know better for the next time and eventually, if you make enough mistakes, you become the expert. This does happen.

Keywords: Sustainability, networks, play, moving from distress to stress, sharing, being greenish, turning away from things we can't change that are disturbing, openness, finding your way (successful failure), being mindful, slowing down, not being "too busy", finding constancy, communicate, connecting

TLt Summit - Media is Melting, Man, and I Don't Wanna Swim

General - Information Literacy
Brian Lamb

Super long (15 minutes so far) audio mix intro, not sure what is going on here, but most people in the audience look annoyed. We see the interface of Kenaxis and Brian (looking like a hipster DJ) is playing different wav files and making various small adjustments. People are getting up and leaving... some are flipping through the program to reread the description of his presentation.

I read the intro blurb "Can educators stop worrying and learn to love the remix?" Ha ha. Oh, okay now he's playing a cow bell and the accompanying audio is "I got a fever and the only cure is more cow bell". He says "Had enough?" He knows he's alienated everyone.

Now he's pandering to the audience with flickr photos of the Riders and his cute kid and by mentioning 20 years of residency in Saskatoon.

Talking about Walter Ong - writing has "restructured consciousness". Literacy is where you begin to see linear analytic thought. Text has a close association with death: inhuman, thing-like, destroys memory, the book does not breath; it is static.

Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the mechanization of print (printing press) was decisive in the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution and fostered a culture of print.

The telegraph = the Victorian Internet.

Marshall McLuhan thought electronic means of techaching were inherently participatory because they offered inadequate information and the social reach is global in scope.

Neil Postman: Teachers are witnessing the breakup of the knowledge monopoly.

"Strauss and the Electronic Future," 1964 - Originality is overrated - Glenn Gould (Canadian pianist).

Who gets paid?
OMG, he just made a joke about MIT putting courseware online and then casually mentioned that we know MIT went out of business and there's a bunch of engineering bloggers starting up degree programs because all the content is now available online... and no one laughed, scoffed or even smirked. Wow.

What will people pay for?
The chance to interact with experts, to collaborate to be evaluated.

Thirteen people just got up and left the presentation. This is disappointing. I don't know if they don't understand the presentation or they're trying to catch the 4:00 show, or what. It seems to me that people are still somewhat irritated by the extended mashup we were subjected to at the beginning of the presentation, which would probably be very appropriate and engaging for a group of university students, but perhaps not what this group is expecting in a professional development setting.

These are some tips Brian gives for communicating online; be intense, be personal, be prepared to correct yourself, be brief (in higher ed?), update often (be iterative), link out (if not, you're saying we know everything), don't be sticky (make people happy by sending them somewhere good), look good (design), free the conversation (bring in people that aren't part of your cohort).

My battery is about to die and power is scarce in this room, so I'm going to post this even though there's more I'd like to write, but I'd rather post it now than save it as a draft or it might never get up.

TLt Summit - ET Call IT

How Educators and Technology Departments Can Learn to Play Nice
Barry Stewart (IT Manager) & Dean Shareski (Curriculum Consultant)

Working together for about ten years in the Prairie South School Division under the same governance.

It's all on the table. Communicate everything - cc everything, just so we know what is going on.

IT Departments are support - we don't make educational policy. IT professionals shouldn't be making content decisions or deciding what sites students and faculty should be going to.

IT Department has a blog, they make use of video conferencing to communicate (due to geographical challenges).

Tech support team - IT team, educators, senior administration - discuss resources to support development of projects.

Content filter - concept of blocking Facebook akin to patching a leaky boat... what happens when the next social networking software comes along?

School system has healthy decentralized budgets for IT. Tech dept. has to be involved in purchases of systems since there are networking, printing and other resource - such as staffing.

Challenging question to those who want to link technology to outcomes (i.e. strategic plan) - as to those who want to link outcomes to a pencil. Interesting debate here... I think it comes back to not having technology for technology's sake (or for the sake of "coolness") but to facilitate learning and learning objectives.

Case study: Blackboard instructors who switched to Moodle like Moodle better.

Interests me to know that Barry sent two of his staff to New York for training last year. Not cheap, but worthwhile ROI. Barry stated he tells his guys to "be humble" and "remember where you come from" - IT doesn't set policy without consideration and cooperation of the educational and administrative component.

TLt Summit - Ed Tech Posse Round Up 2.0 for Teachers and Learners

General - Teaching & Learning with Technology

Heather Ross, Alec Couros, Richard Schwier, Rob Wall, Dean Shareski

This presentation is about the tools the EdTech posse is interested in, but also about the learning and the teaching. Each will have 5 minutes to talk about their tools of interest.

1.) Heather
Passionate about community - Ning - great connector
Actually, we used Ning in addition to PB wiki for BarCamp last year and it was a good tool.

2.) Rob
Google Docs - commenting on collaboration capabilities, it's also great when you don't have any other software available - like MS Word or Excel or PowerPoint
Teachers are looking at Google Docs for looking at ways of tracking students' work and leaving comments, look at revision history - so they can be more involved in writing process

3.) Rick
iPod Touch - endorses mobile computers and ubiquitous computing
Wants to communicate with people in awkward times
Wiretap Studio - Easy setup to record Skype

4.) Dean
Twitter - most ridiculous thing you ever heard of, but it's really about online prescense
Dean calls his Twitter network his "virtual staff" and says that Twitter is better than Google because it can be a human aggregator of content (seems to me this depends on the capability of the people in your network)

5.) Alec
UStream - instant video stream
Open, social, connected - talking about his course and how he used a wiki, ustream and skype instead of Elluminate and Blackboard or Moodle (makes the distinction between open source and free software)

TLt Summit - Saskatoon (May 15, 2008) Applying Salmon's Emoderating Model

Developing Supporting Learning Communities

This presentation is by Carol Blenkin (Curriculum Writer) and Denise Nelson (Instructional Designer) from SIAST. I met both Carol and Denise a couple of weeks ago in Banff at CNIE when I accidentally sat down to lunch with a table full of Saskatchewan people.

I am interested in this presentation because I frequently hear rumblings of the challenges of moderating the discussion board feature of online courses. Spark is a piece of information that creates discussion or interest in a conversation on a discussion board. SIAST has 215 online courses - they are fully online. In early 2000, Denise discovered that Gilly Salmon was an expert in e-moderating, so she contacted her and had her do an Elluminate session and a 5 week e-moderating course for Campus Sask.

The nurse practitioner program professional development in-service practiced e-moderating skills with real student examples. New tutors/instructors are trained every semester via telephone conferencing.

There are 5 Stages to Salmon's model; access and motivation, online socialisation, information exchange, knowledge construction and development. Particular e-moderating skills are summarizing and weaving or making connections that students might not normally make.

Future steps include peer auditing, evaluation strategies for e-tivities, accommodating different styles of learners, developing a library of e-moderating activities developing summarizing and weaving skills and being transparent to students.

One point Denise made is that they have a lot of support and faculty engagement which leads to success in the program.