AssortedStuff

Next weekend I’ll be heading up to EduCon 2.2, the most unique conference I’ve ever attended.

For one thing, it’s relatively small, although with 500 people registered this year, it will be a little more crowed than the first one in 2008 where 75 or so of us showed up, not knowing what to expect.

But the big difference with EduCon is that the sessions, for the most part, are not lecture/demo presentations or hands-on workshops. And it is not a conference about technology.

The concept of EduCon-founder, and principal of the Science Leadership Academy, Chris Lehman was to get a bunch of interested and interesting educators together to have conversations about how we can change schools to better fit the way our students learn and the real world in which they live, as well as to grow networks of people who would continue those discussions long after the conference ended.

I’ll be leading one of those discussions and, while my topic does address technology, it’s concerned with why schools have remained isolated islands of status quo over the past twenty years, while the rest of the world has been fundamentally altered by computers, networks, and communications tools.

My session is titled “Why Has Technology Failed to Bring Substantial Change to American Schools (and what can we do about it)?” and this is the short description, the in-50-words-or-less explanation of the session in a way that will attract an audience.

The authors of Disrupting Class ask “Why haven’t computers brought about a transformation in schools the way they have in other areas of life?”. Excellent question. Join us for a discussion of what we can do to change that situation. Bring any and all ideas to share.

The proposal for this session grew from my growing frustration with American education and the two-faced embrace of techie tools while at the same time rejecting the transformative possibilities they offer.

Schools in the US have spent billions of dollars in just the past decade to buy laptops and software, install networks, connect classrooms to internet, and train teachers.

However, walk down the halls of your average American school, especially high schools, and you’re likely to see a teacher-directed, lecture-demo formatted lesson, with little or no technology use by either teacher or students.

Over the past few years, the most visible example of technology use in the classrooms of our overly-large school district has been interactive whiteboards, devices which chain teaching to standards of the previous century.

Talk all you want about “student engagement” and “interactivity”, these boards are little more than expensive electronic extensions of blackboards and chalk, controlled by the teacher, and locking the learning focus on them, not the students.

Anyway, IWBs are a topic for another rant and only a small piece of the discussion that I’d like to have in Philly.

If you’re coming to EduCon, please join us at 12:30 Sunday afternoon for what I hope will be a wonderful exchange of ideas on this topic.

And don’t think you must agree with the premise to participate. Feel free to let me know that I’m full of crap and that I’ve missed the mark entirely. Bring evidence of my cluelessness, however. :-)

If you’re not able to be at the conference in person, you can still attend and join the discussion online through the generous efforts of Elluminate who will be providing an interactive room for each session.

Links to the Elluminate rooms will be available from the conversations page on the EduCon site.

Now, if they can just keep the snowy weather out of town for the weekend, we’ll be golden.

chris lehmann, conferences, conversation, educon, philadelphia, schools, sla

I’m just about finished with my not-quite-at-the-last-minute prep for my trip to our annual state edtech conference, sponsored by the Virginia Society for Technology in Education.

The program starts on Monday but I’ll be headed to beautiful downtown Roanoke just before noon tomorrow, mainly so I don’t have to leave at 3am. :-)

If you happen to be in the neighborhood, Tuesday afternoon I’ll be doing a concurrent session titled You Don’t Have Too Much Information. You’re Using The Wrong Tools.

It’s a variation on the same presentation about why you should be using Google Reader, Delicious and Evernote I’ve been doing in 90 minute to three hour time frames for a while.

However, this is the first time I’ve tried to squeeze the essence into an hour so we’ll see how that goes.

Bright and early Wednesday morning (7:30?!), I’ll be doing a Bring Your Own Laptop workshop on Building Tours in Google Earth.

Around my sessions I’m looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues from other parts of the state in an analog, face-to-face way that’s still not possible with Twitter.

Even if you’re not staying to hear my ravings, stop in and say hi.

conferences, delicious, evernote, google earth, google reader, vste

Since EduCon 2.2 proposals were due today, of course I submitted mine just a few hours ago. Nothing new… I usually do my other homework assignments at the last minute as well. :-)

EduCon is something unique among the many education-related conferences out there.

Sessions don’t involved being lectured at or about playing with the coolest new tools. It’s all about the “opportunity to discuss and debate ideas” dealing with just about anything to do with education and learning.

Anyway, my little proposal borrows ideas from the book Disrupting Class, in which the authors note that we’ve spent a lot of money on computers for classrooms while getting very little change.

In the book Disrupting Class, the authors make the observation “While people have spent billions of dollars putting computers into schools, it has resulted in little change in how students learn.”

They also ask “Why haven’t computers brought about a transformation in schools the way they have in other areas of life?”

Excellent question. Certainly there are plenty of answers, including this one also from Disrupting Class “…the way schools have employed computers has been perfectly predictable, perfectly logical – and perfectly wrong.”

But the focus of this session will not be about placing blame. Instead let’s discuss what we can do and what is being done to change things. Come join us for a discussion centered on these ideas and bring any and all ideas, whether from your personal experience or elsewhere. Invite your friends and colleagues who aren’t attending EduCon to be part of the conversation from wherever they are.

With any luck, the program will see fit to include that in the agenda. I did a session at the first iteration of EduCon and it was a great experience.

If you haven’t made your plans to attend EduCon, do it now. If you’re not able to come to Philly in January, watch for how to participate from wherever you are through a variety of back channels.

conferences, educon, philadelphia, proposal

Yesterday at the Building Learning Communities conference, one of the speakers offered up an interesting statistic.

75% of college graduates never read another book in their lifetime.

Wow!

That’s an incredible statement, although it must be true since he put it on a slide projected on a big screen in front of nearly a thousand people.

Anyway, it’s also the kind of number that just didn’t sit well with my crap detector.

A little bit of Googling turned up similar statements (like the one in this collection of book stats) with different (smaller) numbers.

And the speaker did qualify his statement with something about that 75% including people who started reading books but never completed them.

Still, three quarters of the college educated population not reading even one book after graduation strikes me as awfully high.

Did the researchers include audio books? Books parents read to their kids? Graphic novels?*

As with the results of so many polls, surveys, and studies, you really can’t understand the results without knowing the source and the method used to assemble the numbers.

However, we have a large part of the population in the US (and possibly elsewhere in the world) who often accept the statistical numbers handed to them almost daily as fact.

Unless, of course, they come into major conflict with their own beliefs. And even then, they don’t question the numbers as much as they outright reject them.

Wherever the 75% number came from (and I have no doubt some pollster somewhere did get it), it’s just one more example of why we need to do a better job of teaching students to understand probability and statistics before they become adults.

After all, they need to know that 67% percent of all statistics are simply made up. Right? :-)

[The picture is of some books from my bookshelf. And yes I've read them all since college. Well... except for Harry Potter #7.]

*Don’t laugh, some of them have very complex stories!

blc09, books, college, conferences, reading, statistics

In the 1980′s era musical “Chess“, the lead character proclaims the tournament in which he is about to participate to be “… a show with everything but Yul Brynner*”.

That lyric has been running through my warped little brain as I’ve been reviewing my notes and watching some of the video from NECC, the annual edtech expo that wrapped up here in DC just over a week ago.

This is one conference that really does have something for everyone – or at least anyone even remotely connected to instructional technology.

However, one big impression I always have following NECC is to feel sorry for the novice.

The sheer size of this carnival is overwhelming, which also makes it hard for newbies to find the good stuff.

Certainly someone who followed the crowds likely saw lots of rapid fire examples of cool web 2.0 tools, not to mention lots and lots of people poking at interactive whiteboards.

The two largest manufacturers of those devices were conference “Tier 1 sponsors” so they, and the people selling them as the ultimate edtech solution, were impossible to miss. (I feel a new rant about IWBs coming on. :-)

Hopefully someone guided those NECC first-timers into the area for the poster sessions where they were far more likely to see examples of authentic uses of technology for teaching and learning.

For me, the highlight of NECC was once again was the day-long EduBloggerCon, an event that’s not even part of the formal conference. (Most of us in the class of 09 are pictured at the left.)

This was the third year for this meetup/unconference and the size and style returned to being more like the first time around in Atlanta.

Lots of valuable discussions (big and small) along with the always-valued opportunity to meet some of the people whose work I regularly follow online.

So, that’s pretty much it for this year.

As I noted earlier, our commitments to support the conference didn’t allow for many sessions or getting involved in many Blogger’s Cafe discussions, making this year’s event a different sort of experience.

Or any blogging during those five days, although for many, Twitter has taken over that function.

And I’m already looking forward to getting back to normal (or whatever passes for normal) next June in Denver.

* Look him up, kiddies. :-)

conference, conferences, dc, edubloggercon, necc09

One day last week during the NECC conference, I was standing at the Ask Me table near the Bloggers’ Cafe, talking with a couple of colleagues from our overly-large school district.

Among other things, I was trying to explain Twitter to them (something I seem to be doing more and more of lately).

At one point a woman brought over a cellular wireless card that someone had left on one of the couches in the Cafe.

And under normal circumstances it would have gone to the conference lost and found, to sit in a box waiting for someone to figure out exactly where that office was in the huge convention center.

But… expensive wireless service, lounge area dedicated to bloggers… I figured the owner must be a Twitterer. So, I tossed a 140 character notice into the mix.

They may not follow me but, considering the people who hang out in that area of the hall, the number of degrees of separation between me and them was probably far less than six.

Anyway, it only took a few hours to get the card back to it’s owner.

Ok, I admit, as an example of the power of Twitter, that story doesn’t rise even close to the same level as the way the system is being used by the election protesters in Iran.

But it’s a nice little illustration of how this particular tool helps connect the members of one particular network in ways that were impossible even a few years ago.

conferences, necc09, network, twitter

Ok, so normal may not be the right word.

But the recently concluded NECC (soon to be the conference formerly known as NECC) certainly was a very different experience from the past four or five I’ve attended.

Much of that was due to having the event so close to town (and commuting into town instead of staying in a hotel) in addition being more involved with both supporting the conference and our district’s presence.

Going far away for a conference is somewhat isolating, even with constant connectivity, and going home every night instead of a hotel allowed real life to intrude.

One result was that I didn’t get to many sessions, but I’m not sure that’s a big problem. Increasingly for me the real value of a conference like NECC is not found in the presentation rooms but in the corners and hallways.

It was not being able to spend much time in the Blogger’s Cafe or at NECC Unplugged (not to mention the after hours conversations) that I missed most.

Fortunately, I did make it to EduBloggerCon, which is more of those less formal discussions (more thoughts about that in another post). And my session went well.

Anyway I’ll also be spending more time than would be normal in the weeks following NECC going through the videos and other online materials to get some idea of what I missed.

And figuring out how I can get to Denver next year.

conferences, dc, ebc09, necc09

In advance of his keynote this Sunday at NECC, I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Overall it was a very good read, about on par with The Tipping Point and much better than Blink.

As always, Gladwell is a great story teller and does an excellent job of helping us get to know the people he calls outliers.

Unfortunately, as with his other works, he also works way too hard to stretch his anecdotes into fitting around his thesis, which in this case essentially can be summarized as “chance favors the prepared mind”*.

But there’s one example late in the book that had me yelling at the pages.

In that chapter, Gladwell is discussing a study showing the change in reading scores over summer break for students in different socioeconomic classes.

Now take a look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. [his emphasis] The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.

From this he concludes: “Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.”

No!

The reasons for the large gains made over the summer by wealthy kids is not more of the same traditional schools. The explanation is provided by Gladwell right there on the same pages.

Those “rich kids” went to summer camps, museums, and “special programs”. They had “plenty of books to read” at home and parents who both encouraged and modeled reading.

Their parents “see it as their responsibility to keep [them] actively engaged in the world” around them.

Gladwell may be right that some kids need more time in school in order to raise their achievement levels (aka test scores). However, that’s not what’s happening here – or what should be happening.

The students who showed the most gains over the summer did so because of the alternative learning opportunities they received, that active engagement with a variety of sources, guided – not taught – by their parents.

Just extending the school year, one of the school reforms most loved by politicians and education “experts”, will do absolutely no good for any socioeconomic group of kids if that additional time is filled with more of the same test-prep-driven activities used during the current calendar by most schools.

And, no, I’m not convinced that the extended school day/week/year, highly regimented KIPP model Gladwell discusses in the same chapter is one that should be replicated for all students, not even for all low achieving kids.

More time is not the answer to better education. Better time is.

* The more commonly used version of Louis Pasteur’s original observation that “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind”.

calendar, conferences, education, kipp, malcolm gladwell, necc09, reform

For those of you coming to DC for the NECC conference beginning next weekend, some transportation options for getting away from the Convention Center.

A car should probably be your last resort since you really don’t want to drive into DC on a weekday. Traffic is generally lousy and parking is hard to find (the Center says there are 3000 spaces close by; that’s optimistic), not to mention that it can be expensive.

Also on the expensive side are taxi cabs and short trips on the Metro system. Fares on Metro run $1.65 to $4.50 per trip during morning and afternoon rush hour (slightly lower at other times) depending on how far you travel.

At least the cabs are now using standard meters like those in every other major city instead of the hard to understand (and easy to get ripped off) zone system we had for decades.

Walking is always an option in good weather, although the Convention Center isn’t especially close to the big name tourist attractions.

However, Chinatown is nearby and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Building Museum and the International Spy Museum (all worth a visit) are five to seven blocks away.

If you need to get from the Convention Center area to the National Mall and don’t want to walk (which can be a long hike in hot, humid weather), consider taking the DCCirculator bus.

Their busses run every 10 minutes on a round trip between the Convention Center and the Waterfront area, stopping on the Mall near the Museum of Art and the Air and Space Museum.

The Circulator also runs a crosstown route between Union Station and Georgetown* with stops on the south end of the Center (across Mt. Vernon Square Park) and one that circulates around the mall and Capitol Hill.

Each trip is $1 or you can pay $3 for a one-day, all-you-can ride pass.

Lots of other bus routes run through the area but plan your trip carefully since their routes can sometimes be confusing and not well marked on the signs at some stops.

* BTW, if anyone tells you to take Metro to the Georgetown Station, you are being punk’d. It doesn’t exist.

conferences, dc, necc09, traffic, travel

Last week, Karen and I did a session for the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) national conference being held here in the DC area.

Carrying the somewhat cheesy title of “Learn New Tech Tools”, we nevertheless had a good time with it. I think the folks who spent two hours with us enjoyed themselves and left with some new ideas.

Overall, it went well. Considering that none of it – the concept, title, description – was our idea.

This was one of those situations when someone else submitted the proposal, couldn’t travel to DC, and a friend of the local arrangements committee drafted us to fill in.

While I was pleased with our session, the conference as a whole, however, was another story.

For one thing, this NSDC meeting was only slightly more tech savvy than the one we presented at four years ago.

They offered no wireless access in the convention center (brand new this year) and we had to pull some strings to avoid paying for a connection to use in our heavily web-based session.

The lack of tech usage was especially apparent in the program, which was very thin on topics you might expect like online professional development or using the read/write web for instruction.

It was also reflected in the many presenters wheeling around piles of paper handouts, chart paper, and overhead projectors.

And then there were the keynote presentations. Both of those I attended were more like extended infomercials featuring bad PowerPoint shows with lots of text-heavy slides that were unreadable from many parts of the hall.

Ok, I know I’ve been spoiled by the extremely wired echo chamber in which I spend most of my time.

In the past few years, I’ve become very accustomed to have easy, almost continual access to a back channel populated by lots of smart people who have many innovative ideas for improving education and know how to present them in creative ways.

I guess being dropped into a professional situation which is largely cut off from that rich atmosphere of learning is somewhat jarring.

Maybe the next time we present at NSDC (another four years?), the organization will have learned a little more about the ever expanding options for professional development in the 21st century.

conferences, dc, learning, nsdc, web 2.0