Face to Face Big Ideas

This week, while I attend the Mobile 2012 conference, I am lucky to be able to take the light rail to the event each day, which gives me time to use one of my favorite apps, Read It Later, (is very similar to InstaPaper). In it, I save all the things that I want to read, but will probably forget about if I don't save them. Added bonus: it saves them in an offline mode so I can read them anytime (usually when I'm waiting on something). What I usually pair Read It Later with is the LongReads twitter feed. LongReads makes it its business to promote longer-form essays, which don't tend to be too popular in this day and age of two-paragraph news articles and 24 hour news tickers.

The essay I read today during my light rail ride was an opinion piece from the New York Times called "The Elusive Big Idea." It's main premise is that we're living in the Information Age, where we can know anything with Google, Wikipedia, etc. and where we can know everything about our friends through social media. However, there are very few big ideas or "big idea"-type people around anymore, and the ones that are around, aren't heard.

It makes excellent points about how social media especially leads us to focus on the short, distilled form of knowledge about a topic, rather than anything that deeply explores the ideas that can lead to new inspiration. The author quotes Yogi Berra who said that you can't think and hit at the same time. I have found this to be quite true at this conference (and conferences in general). When I sit and listen to a keynote, I rarely just sit and listen. Often I'm taking notes and tweeting quotes from the speaker throughout the process. While I'm glad I do this on some level, I'm fairly certain it doesn't encourage me to actually thoroughly digest the ideas that are being presented to me, because I'm too busy tweeting that fascinating statistic the speaker just mentioned, etc. In fact, the author of this article describes it as not just a form of distraction, but "anti-thinking."


However, I do draw encouragement from conferences like this, because it is an incubator of big ideas. One speaker yesterday quoted Steve Jobs, who is obviously a technology guru, as saying,

"There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."

When we take time to sit down with other people and talk about how we go about doing things, and thoughts we've been pondering of how to make our teaching better, those big ideas can become real practices that can fundamentally change what we do. As the author states, "While social networking may enlarge one's circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same as enlarging one's intellectual universe." I feel that gathering, idea-discussing, and brainstorming are the incubators of today's big ideas. In many ways, the face-to-face conference is from the last generation, but it serves a critical purpose for today. Direct contact is what inspires the big ideas of the future.


[Img: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Stevejobs_Macworld2005.jpg ]

Why Digital Literacy Matters

For years, I've heard teachers in the district rave about tech camp in Tucson. For years, I've thought, "Hm, that sounds nice. Too bad I wouldn't be able to convince anyone to pay for me to go to a resort for a week." In reality, I never asked, I just assumed that was the case. Yes, I know what that makes me. It also goes against my philosophy of "You never know till you ask." Either way, when my Instructional Technology director happened to mention that he still had slots to fill for both ISTE 2011 and tech camp, I "happened to mention" that I had never been to either. (Subtle of me, right?) So, when he offered me a spot at tech camp, I was all over it. And here I am!

While it's affectionately called tech camp, it's officially called "Camp Plug & Play 6.0" and is sponsored by the AZ K-12 Center. It's not a conference, so much as an extended workshop, in which you learn a specific skill all week. Some of this week's strands focus on iMovie, interactive whiteboards, Google, and digital storytelling (the strand I was signed up for). Though it's not really a standard sit-and-get conference, there was a keynote speaker yesterday, who made some excellent points. Her name is Angela Maiers and she was so passionate, I decided to go back for an optional evening session on the first day when I was already exhausted. The focus of her second presentation was the importance of digital literacy. I have never seen someone speak so passionately on this topic (for good reason)! These are some of her best points, written through my lens.  

Being literate is no longer only about being able to read words. Obviously that is a critical, first step, but if you don't know how to communicate in this new digital world, you will feel like you're in a foreign country. We see evidence of this everyday as more and more people with public identities try to speak in a language in which they are not literate (Representative Weiner, etc., etc., etc.) One of her key elements to being literate in the digital world is learning how to be a "great infosumer." Not only do our children have to know how to read, now they have to know how to find and then select the most relevant, accurate information. Without this, we have students meandering all over the wasteland of the internet looking at images as "research" or using Honda.com as an impartial source of information. 

Then, once they find the information their looking for, they need to know how best to represent that information to others. This includes synthesizing that information into a person's own unique words and understanding, as well as adding new information to what is already available. While many of our students are experts at knowing how to upload a fight video to Youtube or how to post on Facebook, they are absolutely clueless on how to post information that the world finds valuable. In Ms. Maiers' words, "The web doesn't care about you until you contribute valuable information to the community." Our students rarely think beyond the borders of their own community. They don't realize that there is a whole world of people who may be viewing their work, and that if those people find it valuable, it could be shared with hundreds and thousands of people. It absolutely behooves us to help our students differentiate between information for friends and information that is useful to people around the world. 

On a related note, we have to teach kids about how to act respectably and respectfully on the web. Heaven knows adults are not setting good examples for them, and we must point this out to them. We have to help them have a bit of foresight and know that the internet actually "does NOT have an erase button." There is no such thing as deleting. If your screen name in 7th grade was sexychica, it will define you for far longer than you want. Everything a student puts on the web will be searchable by someone, potentially someone you don't want to find it (a future employer?) and will do so long after it ceases to represent who he/she really is. (There are fantastic interviews with students on this point in Along Together.) We have to help our students have the foresight to represent themselves well. 

These were just a few of the points she covered in her 60 minutes, but she was kind of enough to show us her full-blown graduate class information via her wiki for free. Check it out if you want step-by-step lessons for ways to teach these concepts to your students. Needless to say, I will definitely be including portions of this information in my courses this year. 

MEC 2010 Day 1

"How did you get your administrator to let you go to that MEC conference at ASU??" Well, I asked. If you wish you could go to a fun tech conference, ASK! I can't guarantee it'll work all the time, but it works more often than you'd imagine :-) I had a blast today at my first big edtech conference, and especially had fun tweeting about it! I never get to tweet that much since I don't have a data plan on my phone :-) Anyway, here's a quick summary of some of the cool things I learned about:

-Twitter -Great workshop with Tony Vincent :-)

-Kindergartners who are tweeting!

-Gmail's new Forgotten Attachment Detector (beta)

-Live Classroom 2.0-Free weekly edtech webinars

-Kidsblog-A free blogging service for kids that doesn't require email addresses

-Twoogie-a fun one for fans of Twitter and Doogie Howser MD :-)