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

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

Before I can go to sleep (and while the pills are beating back my headache), I need to post a couple of thoughts on this weekend’s EduCon 2.1.

None of this will be about the actual content of the discussions. I need to spend some time reviewing the archives and my notes, not to mention the posts and tweets by other members of the group.

After the excellent experience last year, I was a little worried that the sophomore event might suffer from growth.

That’s what happened to EduBloggerCon, the NECC pre-event that was a wonderful meet-up with 70 people in its first year. When the numbers jumped to 200+ the second time around, it was more like another day of conference sessions than a collection of discussions.

The same thing didn’t happen to EduCon.

Chris and his planners did a great job of growing the number of participants, adding some additional structure, and still keeping the conversational feeling.

Something else that’s been running around my head most of the weekend, is that I need to do some additional work on my personal network.

At a minimum, that probably means rebuilding my aggregator and Twitter feed. It will probably also include some re-evaluation of what I’m doing with this space.

Anyway, that’s enough reflecting for tonight. More EduCon thought dumping later.

In the meantime, the dates for EduCon 2.2 have already been set for January 29 – 31, 2010, again in beautiful Philadelphia (sorry to whoever tweeted about a change in venue to the Bahamas :-).

If you’re at all interested in the reform of public education, plan to join us. Better yet, be part of planning the weekend.

conference, educon, philadelphia

Last January, Chris Lehmann organized EduCon 2.0, an incredible and very unique little gathering at his school, the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

It’s hard to call the event a “conference” since that calls to mind a formal agenda with structured sessions and lots of vendors hanging around waiting to sell something.

Instead the few hundred of us who attended spent two plus days engaged in conversations about education, technology, innovation and how to bring all the pieces together to improve teaching and learning.

When you include the great interaction with the amazing staff and students at SLA, it was pretty much impossible not to come away with a head full of new ideas and some great inspiration.

Since he didn’t learn his lessons from last year (putting this together is a lot of work! :-), Chris will be hosting EduCon 2.1 on January 23-25, again in Philadelphia at the SLA. Details, including the conversations already scheduled, are in the wiki.

If you’re within driving distance of Philly, please consider joining us. If you can’t attend in person, there will still be plenty of opportunities to participate through uStream, Twitter, and other back channels.

And, for even more thought-provoking fun, plan to come a day early to join Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge, created and driven by Gary Stager.

While I will be certainly be at EduCon (with warmer clothes this time!), unfortunately, I can’t come on Thursday. But considering the people Gary has lined up, it should be a pretty intensive day.

Chris notes that Aaron Sorkin wrote “Decisions are made by those who show up.”

Ok, so it’s time to show up!

chris lehmann, conferences, philadelphia, sla

Well, this should piss off more than a few people from the intellectual back woods.

Nine academic, scientific and cultural institutions around [Philadelphia] are holding a Year of Evolution, a series of exhibitions, seminars and lectures to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin next February, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, “The Origin of Species.”

Events will include a talk by John E. Jones III, a federal judge who ruled in 2005 that teaching intelligent design — the belief that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must be the work of a higher power rather than of evolution — in public school science classes was unconstitutional.

The intent of the citywide event, said Janet M. Monge, one of the organizers, is to increase public understanding of evolution and science in general at a time when polls show that a majority of Americans believe God created man in his present form and that the number of people who accept the evolutionary model of human origins is declining.

Of course, the creationism/”intelligent” design folks cry that the government is trying to force a “religious” viewpoint on all of us.

That their “theories”, supported by absolutely no physical or reproducible evidence, carry just as much weight as 150 years of real scientific research.

As always, they’re full of crap.

Bravo to the organizers of this program for making a major effort to educate the public at a time when large numbers of them want to remain ignorant.

evolution, philadelphia, science, stupidity

Last week Chris stealthly posted some basic information about the 2009 of Educon, version 2.1, to be held once again at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

The dates are January 23-25 and, as with the inaugural edition last January, he’s inviting the world to help with the planning.

The first Educon was a great experience and I’m very much looking forward to the next one.

conferences, educon, philadelphia