Monday, July 17, 2006
As the shuttle bus from the hotel made that last turn toward Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, I felt that sense of anticipation and familiarity as I recognized the place I had had such a rewarding experience a year ago. Yes, I had been at last year’s Lausanne Laptop Institute and that experience was very positive. I was sure, as I disembarked from the air-conditioned coach, that the 2006 session was going to be a great experience, too.
After a bit of granola, coffee, and fruit, I was off to the Elder Performing Arts Center for the opening keynote address of the conference.
Keynote Speech
Redefining Literacy in the 21st Century
Speaker:
David Warlick, The Landmark Project
As most conferences do, this one opened with an address from an invited “expert” or “guru” and Lausanne was no different. David Warlick, of the Landmark Project and many other educational technology initiatives, was set to speak on the subject “Redefining Literacy in the 21st Century”. But before he spoke, a few minutes were dedicated toward welcome to the 460 (!) attendees of this year’s Laptop Institute. Stewart Crais, Lausanne’s Director of Technology and Lorrie Jackson, the person most responsible for organizing this year’s Institute (she’s a tech integrationist at Lausanne, I believe) made sure we all felt welcome and ready to start a stimulating conference.
Not surprising in this day when Internet access is viewed by a large cross-section of people as a daily activity and routine, David’s talk began with a list of online resources up on the big screen These were designed to illustrate various points he was about to make in his address to us. They included:
About Wikis:
http://davidwarlick.com/wiki-warlick/index.php?title=Redefining_Literacy_for_the_21st_Century
Web links related to this specific presentation:
http://davidwarlick.com/wiki-warlick/index.php?title=Web_Links_Related_to_this_Presentation
David Warlick’s own Wiki:
http://davidwarlick.com/wiki-warlick/index.php?title=Main_Page
Presentation handouts:
http://handouts.davidwarlick.com
The homepage of Mr. Warlick’s Landmark Project:
http://www.landmark-project.com/index.php
David directly launched into an example he felt illustrated the importance of teaching our students the “new literacy”. He asked, “Does a social studies teacher need study guides anymore?” Instead of a study guide produced, printed, and distributed by the teacher, he invited that hypothetical teacher to consider creating a wiki page devoted to the particular curricular unit. Assign students to make their own contributions from their own research to the collected information that the wiki will form. David maintains that today’s literacy is marked by communication and collaboration. Why not use the power of the group to find the information and collaborate on a study guide rather than doing the traditional teacher-centric version yet one more time?
But what about making sure each student knows the body of knowledge needed for that curricular unit? Wouldn’t the social studies teacher be abandoning her/his responsibility to monitor each student’s learning by doing a wiki or allowing group work and collaboration?
David would argue, no. There is nothing in this model that means minimum requirements for each student are gone. It does mean the teacher would have to re-think the assignment, perhaps adjust the goal of the assignment and certainly the method for completing it. She/he would also have to re-design – or at least re-think – the way to assess student learning and what constitutes completing the assignment. David reminded us that even as wiki pages evolve, are edited and re-edited, the previous versions are archived. All page edits are identified with the author which means that all individual student contributions could be identified and assessed.
Even factoring in a little inborn skepticism on my part, I thought such a methodology would be well-worth trying. I certainly agree that all our online resources make collaboration very easy. Why not use those tools to build student knowledge, too?
After just a few minutes of speaking, David took us a little by surprise saying he was going to skip to his conclusion: Stop integrating technology in our schools.
Instead, we need to teach our students the primary importance of verifying information (in this day of information overload), as well as techniques and tools for sifting through the stuff they don’t need and find the material they do.
We must teach our students (and probably ourselves, too) how to uncover the origins of information we access and use.
On the subject of information and how much there is out there, David gave us a statistic to the effect (I may not have this absolutely correct): In 2003, the amount of new knowledge added that year amounted to 5 exabytes*…or 37,000 Library of Congresses-worth. That’s a heck of a lot of data!
I have been well aware that there is a near-unlimited about of data out there but hearing that rather dramatic statistic does underscore the need on all of our parts to know how to make sure the material we’re reading/hearing/seeing, is legitimate and trustworthy.
To illustrate this last point, David displayed a web page with background and biographical information about Martin Luther King. No author or sponsoring organization was listed but there were pictures and paragraphs of text. The page itself had a polished and professional look that certainly looked authentic.
However polished, David warned, without clear information about authorship and/or organization responsible for the page (or site), one can’t consider this a trustworthy site and it’s not possible to verify the content.
We have to verify.
And to illustrate why, David tried to find out who was the author or sponsor. By deleting the page name in the URL, he found the parent page, which was an introductory page about Martin Luther King with, of course, a link to the page we started with. The parent page had the same great professional look. Yet, there was still no indication of an author or sponsoring organization.
At the bottom, you could click on a link to contact the webmaster. David looked at the mailto: link, found a name and a domain. He didn’t recognize the web master’s name or the domain. He could have searched on the person’s name, but decided to start by seeing if there was a website with that domain name. He inserted the domain in a URL. To our collective surprise (and shock) we were looking at a white supremacist website! The sponsoring organization for this ostensibly authentic website about Martin Luther King was really a white supremacist organization! These specific pages have since been removed but this scenario certainly illustrates the importance all of us need to accept to verify online content.
The Literacy Tasks David laid out include:
- find the information
- decode it
- critically evaluate it
- organize the information into personal digital libraries
David showed a study of a group of online retailers (Rhapsody, Amazon, and Netflix) which showed there to be a so-called “long tail” in terms of availability of content. A link to the actual study is at: http://www.wired.com/wired/images.html?issue=12.10&topic=tail&img=2
The upshot is that there is a body of titles – music, books, movies – which amounts to common core of titles widely available. The titles, you might say, are the core group that you’d find at brick-and-mortar retailers. What has changed in recent years is the “long tail.” If you look at the right portion of the group, the “long tail” is the much flatter part of the graph that represents titles published in far few numbers than the core group. What has changed is availability. Before the advent of online bookstores, music download sites, and other online venues for buying content, you’d be looking at “out of print” notices. Now, however, there is far greater access to content that is way off the best-seller charts which gives us yet more access to information and points of view.
David gave the example of his own book. Once he finished writing and editing it, he used a self-publishing site on the web (http://www.lulu.com/) to get it “out there.” David claimed his book was available for purchase about two hours after he finished submitting it online. This is, obviously, much different than the way authors used to publish their books. Similar opportunities are available to composers, musicians, and film makers.
Not to mention our students: students can upload their movie to any number of sites (i.e. YouTube). Or their digital pictures to Flickr. Or they can put their short stories on a blog. Or they can podcast an audio diary to iTunes. The landscape for accessing and sharing information is changing!
It has never been easier for anyone to get their work distributed to a worldwide audience.
Another concept David put out there is that it should be one’s goal in her/his writing expresses ideas in a compelling fashion.
Unfortunately, due to lack of time, the final tenet of the new literacy that David had up there on the screen he had to skip. The word up there was “Ethics”. Even though he didn’t have the time to spell this out, it certainly makes sense to me that just as we must verify information, we must also bear in mind the importance of ethics with respect to the production and use of ideas and material. This is copyright and fair use, certainly, but I imagine David would have elaborated in more detail about the role of ethics as it plays out in the day of wide dissemination and sharing on information and ideas so often accomplished with a mere click of the mouse. I’m sorry he ran out of time.
As you want any keynote address to do, David Warlick’s talk gave me much to think about. I’ve bookmarked a number of his sites and will look for time to go back to them, re-read his thinking, and do a better job of digesting it all.
[By the way, David requested that, if we blog about this presentation, we include these three words in the blog text or tag:
redefine --- literacy --- warlick
Why? Our networked world makes it possible to share information in ways not possible before. By including those specific words a search/gathering tool he has set up will add that blog entry to all the others that contain those words, forming an ever-growing and ever-changing collection of thinking and observations. People can read and think about other people’s ideas and perspectives while sharing their own. Amazing!]
David’s contact info:
david@landmark-project.com
919-414-1845
*In case you’re interested – and I was because I had never heard the term before – an exabyte amounts to a billion gigabytes.
Now begins the conference and the scheduled sessions.
This year, the sessions are organized in various strands. There are strands for Integrationist, Teacher, Support, Administrator, plus some for exhibitors and so on. My first session was in the Integrationist strand.
Session 1
Tech Goal-Setting Strategies
Presenter:
Deidre Brown – Staff Development Coordinator – Randolph School – Huntsville, AL
Ms. Brown comes from the Randolph School in Huntsville and she is the Staff Development Coordinator there. Her focused on aspects of the professional development system at Randolph
To begin with, at Randolph each department has a Technology Integration Consultant (known as a TIC [sic]). They are the go-to people for members of their department. Randolph has a tech team as well. The way Deidre described the set-up of TICs, it must work pretty well. The TIC is a contracted position with a signed contract and stipend.
Randolph asks each faculty, staff, and administrator to come up with an annual Individual Learning Plan (ILP) in which specific technology goals are set by the individual. Each ILP is presented to the person’s respective TIC and to the department head, and perhaps the division director. At some point in the year, the TIC will check on the various goals the individuals have specified; Deidre puts all the people and their goals on a spreadsheet of her own. That way, come late winter or spring she can approach her colleagues, ask how the progress of attaining their tech goals are going, and offer help with any still unmet These tech goals are not part of the individual’s yearly evaluation and, if they miss making a goal, they can roll it over into the next year. The ultimate goal of the program is not to admonish failure but, rather, to encourage learning, professional growth, and success.
Deidre gave us samples of ILP forms – blank and filled out.
Another document she shared was a skill sheet which gathers skill lists, various programs, and assorted other tech information for reference. Why? People can’t decide on a tech skill goal if they don’t the skill they don’t yet have. This sheet offers a wide array of possible opportunities for new learning. Think of it as a way to “prime the pump” for setting tech goals.
At some point in the year, the each department head presents the group department goals at a department meeting.
Teachers at Randolph may apply for grants to present their own summer technology trainings. If their proposal is accepted, they receive a small stipend.
Session 2
A Guide to Web 2.0: The Changing Shape of Information
Presenter:
David Warlick (see background info above)
In some ways, an extension of his keynote this morning, David Warlick focused on the future and information, if not literacy per se. Information, he said, in the last ten years, has become:
- networked
- available in digital form
- overwhelming (which I took to refer to the flow and breadth of information coming at us every day)
Furthermore, he said, in the last two years:
- content is created more and more based on conversations (blogs, forums, e-mail, wikis, etc.)
- content depends on the behavior of readers and users
- content is increasingly connected with others through ideas
David recommended a downloadable book by Terry Freedman called Coming of Age. I’ll try to get around to downloading it and see what it has to say.
David recommended another book – The New Shape of Knowledge, by Dave Weinberger
David went into mashups which he defined as websites that gather information from a collection of other websites and makes something new of that info. The Wikipedia definition of mashup is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)).
One example of news tracking David showed was Buzztracker (http://buzztracker.org/). Buzztracker monitors news and notes where the news is from or about. It compiles these feeds, tallies how many refer to what place, and then indicates this activity with dots on a world map. The larger the dot, the more news there is about that city or place. To quote its own introductory blurb:
Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.
Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.
Buzztracker keeps an archive of each day’s activity and map. Going back in the archive is a way to watch the change in the news from day to day
David has created a mashup called Hitchhikr (http://www.hitchhikr.com/) which is focused educational technology events, conference, blogs, and other resources.
To quote his introductory remarks about his site:
In changing times, we need to raise our heads out of the water every once in a while, take a drink of kool-aid, network, learn, and energize. Yet, we can't always make it to the conferences we need to attend to mix with the people we need to see -- face-to-face. This is why Hitchhikr was invented, to provide you with a virtual space where, thanks to blogs, podcasts, and RSS, we can connect, share, respond, and grow knowledge out beyond the place and time of the event.
An example of how this works: To assure that any blog entries about this particular presentation gets linked to other entries about the same event, David requested that people be sure to include “web20” and “warlick” (without quotes, of course) somewhere in the text (or as tags). That way the entries get picked up by Hitchhikr and collected with other entries with the same terms. This, then, being an illustration of how information can be shared widely and immediately to interested audiences in a way not possible even five years ago (or two?!).
How to do wade through all this content? A tool David pointed to was RSS. He demonstrated his favored aggregator and explained, for those who had not encounted RSS feeds before, what they were. I’ve used SharpReader as a stand-alone aggregator as well as the online options such as Bloglines. I’ve gotten the RSS “habit,” too, but I still struggle with how to wade through all the content, even with aids like RSS.
David reiterated the point that “we connect to each other through the content” we seek.
As people use tools like blogs, RSS, wikis, and so on, they create their “personal learning network.” Building one’s own personal learning network is what we must teach our students.
Note about aggregators: David showed the group Bloglines as an online way of subscribing to RSS feeds along with other online content. He also made mention of a new(ish) tool he has started using called Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) which offers a bunch of configurable tools you can add to your page (plus add other tabs for more content) including RSS, Gmail, and other options. Right now in beta, this is a free service out of Paris. When I get a chance, I’m going to set up my own netvibes page.
Tonight is the big dinner of the conference and will be held here at the Hilton in one of the large ballrooms/dining rooms.
Dinner was held in one of the very large convention dining rooms that are here at the Hilton. This year they suggested we find a table with our “strand” indicated so that we would be grouped according to our job focus. In other words, tables were labeled Teachers, Integrationists, Administrators, Support, etc. I sat at one of the Integrationists tables and recognized one person I had already met earlier today, a couple folks familiar from last year, and a group of people new to me. The geographical range at our table ranged from Florida to Tennessee to Iowa to Seattle. We had a nice meal (grilled boneless chicken, grilled veggies, and grits [that’s what the Tennesseans at the table said it was!]).
This has been a great start to the Laptop Institute. Now to get ready for tomorrow
