Steve Hargadon

Live Interview Tuesday, January 24th - Lee Crockett on 21st Century Fluencies

2012-01-23T19:16:00.000-08:00

Join me Tuesday, January 24th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Lee Crockett, co-author of Literacy Is NOT Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age. "Educating students to traditional literacy standards is no longer enough. If students are to thrive in their academic and 21st century careers, then independent and creative thinking hold the highest currency.... Students must master a completely different set of skills to succeed in a culture of technology-driven automation, abundance, and access to global labor markets." (-Corwin book description). The authors write:

"In our present society we are seeing powerful technologies and information systems causing a parallel change in the knowledge base. Why are facts are becoming obsolete faster and knowledge built on these facts less durable? What are the new methods for learning, communicating and collaborating both in business and education? With so much information at our fingertips, how do we discern the good from the bad, the correct from the incorrect, and the empty from the meaningful?

"In today's world, traditional literacy alone is insufficient for success in the classrooms and the workforces of the new digital age. The rapid advancements in technology leading us into the future call for a whole different set of skills to utilize it all to its full potential. "Literacy is Not Enough" defines the essential skills and mindsets our children need to survive and thrive in 21st Century digital culture, through the understanding and application of essential new 21st Century fluencies... and [presents] an effective framework for integrating comprehensive literacy or fluency into the traditional curriculum."

Date: Thursday, January 24th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-01-24.1328.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 recording will be available later this week at http://www.futureofeducation.com.

Lee Crockett is a national award winning graphic designer, marketing consultant, entrepreneur, artist, author and international keynote speaker. Lee Crockett is the Director of Media for the InfoSavvy Group and the managing partner of the 21st Century Fluency Project.

Lee Crockett is the chief architect of the extensive network of websites, web-based applications and presentations of which the infoSavvy group is comprised. Lee is also the co-publisher of the Committed Sardine Blog, which is electronically distributed to more than 100,000 readers in over 60 countries.

Lee is a "just in time learner" first and foremost, constantly adapting to the new programs, languages and technologies associated with today's communications and marketing media.

Understanding the need for balance in our increasingly digital lives, Lee Crockett has lived in Kyoto, Japan where he studied Aikido and Tea Ceremony as well as Florence, Italy, where he studied painting at the Accademia D'Arte. An avid Ducati enthusiast, when in Italy, he is on the track at every opportunity.

Live Interview Thursday, January 19th - Henry J. Eyring on The Innovative University

2012-01-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

Join me Thursday, January 19th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Henry J. Eyring, co-author (with Clayton M. Christensen) of The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. "The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation, and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions." (-Amazon book description)

Date: Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-01-19.1713.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/henryeyring.mp3.

Henry J. Eyring serves as Advancement Vice President at BYU-Idaho. He received a BS degree in Geology from BYU in 1985, and then MBA and JD degrees, also from BYU, in 1989.

From 1989 to 1998, Henry worked for Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Monitor Company, a global management consulting firm. He was Director of the BYU MBA Program from 1998 to 2002. From 2003 to 2006, he was President of the Japan Tokyo North Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since 1995, he has served as a director of SkyWest Airlines.

Henry is the author of two books, Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring and Major Decisions: Taking Charge of Your College Education. He is married to the former Kelly Ann Child, and they are the parents of five children, including two current college students and one recent graduate.

Live Interview Tuesday, January 17th - Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on "The Connected Educator"

2012-01-14T12:06:00.000-08:00

Join me Tuesday, January 17th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on her new book, The Connected Educator. "In The Connected Educator, authors Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall integrate professional development that is currently working in schools with a new model connected learning communities. Connected learning communities are a three-pronged approach to effective professional development using the local (professional learning community), contextual (personal learning network), and global (community of practice) environments. Connected learners take responsibility for their own professional development. They figure out what they need to learn and then collaborate with others to construct the knowledge they need. Instead of waiting for professional learning to be organized and delivered to them, connected learners contribute, interact, share ideas, and reflect." (-Amazon's book description)

Date: Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-01-17.0513.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/sherylnb2012.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach is a 20-year educator who has been a classroom teacher, technology coach, charter school principal, district administrator, university instructor and digital learning consultant. Currently, she is in the dissertation phase of completing her doctorate in Educational Planning, Policy and Leadership at the College of William and Mary.

She is the owner and founder of 21st Century Collaborative, LLC, a digital learning consulting business through which she regularly delivers keynotes, workshops and supports nonprofits in their grant work.

Through the Powerful Learning Practice Network which she co-founded with Will Richardson, she works with schools and districts from across the US, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and Australia to re-envision their learning cultures and communities. http://plpnetwork.com.

Sheryl is a sought after presenter at national and international events, speaking on topics of 21st Century reform, teacher and educational leadership, community building, and educational issues impacting marginalized populations such as the homeless. Her latest book will be published in the fall by Solution Tree. She is also serving on the New Media Consortium’s 2011 Horizon.K12 Advisory board.

Sheryl lives near the Atlantic Ocean and spends her spare time playing on the water with her four children and long haired dachshund Itchy.

Live Interview Thursday, January 12th - Mitch Pearlstein on Family Fragmentation and Education

2012-01-09T22:02:00.000-08:00

Join me Thursday, January 12th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Mitch Pearlstein on his book From Family Collapse to America's Decline. Mr. Pearlstein argues that very "high rates of family fragmentation in the United States are subtracting from what very large numbers of students are learning in school and forever holding them back in other ways," leading to reduced economic competitiveness and deepening class divisions. His "elephant-in-the-room" thesis of the family's impact on educational achievement is "neither a liberal nor a conservative opinion" (Glen C. Loury), and we'll explore with him the difficulties of addressing this topic from both the policy and reform perspectives.

Date: Thursday, January 12th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is available at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-01-12.1527.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/mitchpearlstein.mp3.

Mitch Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a think tank he founded in Minneapolis in 1990. He has made his career in education, journalism and government, having served on the staffs of University of Minnesota President C. Peter Magrath and Minnesota Governor Albert H. Quie; as an editorial writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press; and in the U.S. Department of Education, among other assignments. His newest book, recently released by Rowman & Littlefield, is From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation. Previous books include The Fatherhood Movement: A Call to Action (with co-editors Wade F. Horn and David Blankenhorn); Close to Home: Celebrations and Critiques of America’s Experiment in Freedom (with Katherine A. Kersten); and Riding into the Sunrise: Al Quie and a Life of Faith, Service & Civility. His doctorate is in educational administration from the University of Minnesota and he is married to the Rev. Diane Darby McGowan, a Minneapolis Police Chaplain and Deacon of an Episcopal Parish in St. Paul. They have four adult children, three grandchildren, and currently only two dogs. They live with the latter, Trevor and Bailey, in Minneapolis.

Live Interview Tuesday, January 10th - Ian Jukes on Restructuring Education and 21st-Century Fluencies

2012-01-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

Join me Tuesday, January 10th, for a special live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with the incredibly prolific and dynamic Ian Jukes--who describes himself as a "registered educational evangelist," and says that his mission in life is "to ensure that children are properly prepared for the future rather than society's past." Ian's focus has consistently been on the compelling need to restructure our educational institutions so that they become relevant to the current and future needs of children. We'll talk about the practical issues related to ensuring that change is meaningful, and about the pragmatic issues that provide the essential context for educational restructuring.

Date: Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is available at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-01-10.1343.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording will be available soon after the show.

Ian Jukes has been a teacher, an administrator, writer, consultant, university instructor and keynote speaker. As President of the InfoSavvy Group, an international consulting group that provides leadership and program development in the areas of assessment and evaluation, strategic alignment, curriculum design and publication, professional development, planning, change management, hardware and software acquisition, information services, customized research, media services, and on-line training as well as conference keynotes and workshop presentations.

Over the course of the past 10 years, Ian has worked with clients in more than 40 countries and made more than 9,000 presentations. He typically speaks to between 300,000 and 400,000 people a year. In August 2002 Consulting Magazine Online named him one of the top ten educational speakers in America.

Ian has written twelve books, 9 educational series and had more than 100 articles published in various journals. Ian is also the publisher and co-editor of the Committed Sardine Blog which is electronically distributed to more than 90,000 people in 60 plus countries.

He is also the creator and co-developer of TechWorks, the internationally successful K-8 technology framework; and was the catalyst of the NetSavvy and InfoSavvy information literacy series; he has been a Contributing Editor for several journals and magazines. His published books include Teaching the Digital Generation: No More Cookie Cutter High Schools, Windows on the Future, and Net.Savvy: Building Information Literacy for the Classroom. He has currently released on four new books as part of the 21st Century Fluency Series:

Understanding the Digital Generation: Teaching and Learning in the New Digital Landscape
Living on the Future Edge
Literacy Isn't Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age
Getting it Right: Aligning Technology for 21st Century Learning.

Ian has also worked for several years with architectural firms to help facilitate planning new learning environments by taking the groups through a visioning process to help them align the thinking of the community (school board, administration, parents, students, community) about what new facilities should look like and how its design should align with the learning and instructional intentions of the school/district. Over the course of the past 20 years he has been involved in the design process for more than 60 new schools.

He also works with organizations and communities that have lost their market or economic base and wish to explore possibilities for preferred economic futures. When Ian is not travelling and speaking, he spends his time sailing in the Gulf Islands on the west coast of British Columbia aboard his boat, appropriately named "The Committed Sardine".

2012 ISTE Unplugged - EduBloggerCon's 5th Anniversary, Rebranding, and LOTS of Activities

2012-01-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that five years ago 125 bloggers gathered in Atlanta before NECC (now called ISTE) for EduBloggerCon, and then kept talking in what now seems like a very small "Bloggers' Cafe" area during the conference. Both activities were the brainchildren of the ever-imaginative David Warlick, who had suggested them in a wiki (that I think I helped ISTE set up) to get ideas for the conference. Since I was the conference staff's emerging-technology go-to guy (bringing a lab of Linux computers for the sadly defunct Open Source lab), I took responsibility for organizing EduBloggerCon and the Bloggers' Cafe that year and ever since (a fuller history is available here.)

Since then, a number of community coordinated events now take place at ISTE in the form of a kind of "fringe festival" for those interested in Web 2.0 and social technologies. It says a HUGE amount about the ISTE conference organizers that they not only allow us the latitude to hold these activities, but also actively support them by providing space and wireless access for them.

This year, I'm doing some re-branding of the activities in an attempt to make these events more accessible to ISTE attendees (and easier to describe). As well, I'm adding a couple of new and (I think) incredibly fun meet-ups to the agenda! Everything described at http://www.ISTEunplugged.com is free, although you do have to be registered for the general ISTE conference to participate after Saturday because they take place on-site in the San Diego conference center. Here we go!

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
8:00am - 4:00pm
In the Conference Center
EduBloggerCon no longer seems like the right name for our Saturday all-day unconference, since the topics stretch well beyond blogging at this point. While EduBloggerCon gatherings are still taking place at other conferences (they can be seen at http://www.edubloggercon.com), the annual ISTE event is now SocialEdCon and any and all--regardless of blogging status!--are encouraged to attend. This is a great event for beginners and regular attenders alike! Come join us for an amazing community experience filled with interesting conversations in a highly social environment.

EduBloggerCon 2011 Philadelphia

Many past attendees will tell you that this is the event to attend at ISTE because it's all about connecting and sharing. SocialEdCon is based on the idea of an "unconference," and is organized by the participants in real time on-site. It's maybe better referred to as a "collaborative conference." There are no formal presentations, just "conversations" that you or others facilitate. To lead a session, it is not expected that you prepare material but that you have a topic you want to open to discussion. Every year is different but equally fun! There is no formal signup, but for planning purposes and connecting with others, it's helpful to have you indicate your attendance at the Classroom 2.0 or Facebook event (coming soon) pages.

THE BLOGGER'S CAFE
Monday, June 25th - Wednesday, June 27th
In the Conference Center
The Bloggers' Cafe is a location set aside by ISTE as one of their "lounge" areas for the conference, and is open the full duration of the conference. Often filled well-beyond the seating capacity generously provided, in 2011 there were often over 100 people gathered in this area in small groups, engaged in passionate discussion (one "bay" of the cafe is shown in this photo by Collette Cassinelli). Base camp for some, a landing place for others, the "BC" can often be intimidating to the beginner as they recognize the names of well-known bloggers or social media folks--but the name of the game in the BC is "EVERYONE'S WELCOME!" If someone doesn't notice you or introduce you to the group they are with, it's not for lack of manners, it's just because they are so involved--so please, introduce yourself! The location of the Bloggers' Cafe will be available when the official ISTE program is published.

ISTE LIVE!
Monday, June 25th - Wednesday, June 27th
In the Conference Center
Originally conceived as a "salon de refuses" (thanks, Jane Krauss!), ISTE LIVE! provides an opportunity for anyone attending ISTE to sign up and present a session--whether they were turned down by ISTE, or were too nervous to apply to present, or have a topic to present on that wasn't current when the official presentation proposals were due. ISTE LIVE! runs the full three days of the conference, with sessions during each concurrent session time for the regular conference. The signup materials, and the schedule, will be posted in the early spring at http://www.isteunplugged.com.

NEW ACTIVITIES!

There are going to be three new activities this year, and while they are experiments, we have high hopes! EdIncubator is tentatively scheduled as a Saturday night social event after SocialEdCon, and will be the chance for some start-up ed tech entrepreneurs to do quick presentations and get feedback from the crowd. The 2012 Global Education Summit will be a physical get-together on Sunday afternoon before ISTE's Global Poster session, and will be a mini- and physical-version of the virtual Global Education Conference and all about helping connect students and teachers from around the world. And finally, we're hoping to schedule an Education Apps Meetup during and after one of the "birds of a feather" time slot for talking about mobile/tablet computing and to share apps and ideas.

Hope you'll consider joining us at ISTE this year!

Live Interview Thursday, January 5th - Scott McLeod on School Leadership in the 21st Century

2012-01-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

Join me Thursday, January 5th, for a special live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Scott McLeod, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky. We'll be talking specifically about school leadership in the 21st century, administrator use of social media, changes to teaching and learning because of technology and social media, video games in education, data-driven decision-making, and much more! Scott is someone who is consistently thoughtful and I'm delighted to have him bring his perspectives to our discussions on the future of education.

Date: Thursday, January 5th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-01-05.0952.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/scottmcleod.mp3.

Scott McLeod is the Founding Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), the nation’s only academic center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators, and was a co-creator of the wildly popular video series, Did You Know? (Shift Happens). He has received numerous national awards for his technology leadership work, including recognitions from the cable industry, Phi Delta Kappa, the National School Boards Association, and the Center for Digital Education. In Spring 2011 he was a Visiting Canterbury Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. McLeod blogs regularly about technology leadership issues at Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, and Education Recoded and occasionally at The Huffington Post.

Howard Rheingold Interview with Me on Learning as a Process and Virtual Conferences

2011-12-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

I'm so appreciative of Howard Rheingold and enjoyed this conversation with him about technology and the new dialogs on education. Howard's original post is at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/howard-rheingold/steve-hargadon-reimagining-education-networked-participatory-social-global.

Steve Hargadon: Reimagining Education as Networked, Participatory, Social and Global from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

This Week: Crucial Ed Conversations, Edublog Awards Show, Unplug'd Canada, Community News, and the Hack Education Podcast!

2011-12-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to week eight of this new weekly blog post / email, including the round-up of the week's news and the always-fun podcast with Audrey Watters in which we kept finding ourselves asking: "what would Finland do?" "is a sophisticated factory education still a factory education?," and "do institutions perpetuate the problems they were created to solve?"

ANNOUNCEMENTS + EVENTS

Tuesday, December 13th, (8pm US-Eastern Standard Time), as part of the FutureofEducation.com series, I'll be interviewing David Maxfield, co-author of coauthor of two New York Times bestsellers, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success and Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. David will draw from his academic and business background to discuss the lesson of counter-intuitive courage which is required to avoid teacher burnout and to help effect educational change--and the five crucial conversations that therefore drive educational excellence. The details and connection information page is HERE.
Wednesday, December 14th, I'm co-hosting the annual Edublog Awards show, which starts at 7pm US-Eastern Standard Time. Connection information will appear on the official site shortly. You can also keep voting for your favorite social media in education projects in 19 categories until 11:59pm US-Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, the 13th. To support (vote for!) one of my projects, see this blog post.
Thursday, December 15th (8pm US-Eastern Standard Time), students, teachers, and business leaders involved in the Blue Valley Schools - CAPS Program come will be our guests of FutureofEducation.com. CAPS, the Blue Valley's Center for Advanced Professional Studies in Kansas, brings juniors and seniors from all Blue Valley high schools for a "unique learning opportunity to deeply explore their interests in a profession-based learning approach." Designed to inspire students to succeed in Bioscience, Business, Engineering, and Human Services, CAP brings together industry and education for student-driven learning through authentic problem-based work projects. "CAPS is all about students solving real problems, with real tools (used by real professionals), being mentored by real employers, leading to real contribution." Details and connection information HERE.
The topic for Saturday, December 17th Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show will be "Unplug’d Canada" featuring co-presenters Rodd Lucier, Ben Hazzard, Tom Fullerton, Alec Couros and Zoe Pipe. Unplug’d Canada was a gathering of Canadian educators discussing what it means to be a teacher, a learner and a change agent and publishing the shared stories, essays and personal insights of the collective vision of the group. Show details and information about "tuning in" are HERE.
Don't forget to plan for ISTE Unplugged if you're planning to attend ISTE 2012 conference in San Diego. This will be the fifth year of EduBloggerCon (which is being renamed SocialEdCon), and the always-popular Bloggers' Cafe! More details coming soon, but be sure to add Saturday, June 23rd, into your calendar for when you are making your travel plans! We're also planning both a Global Education Summit and an "Ed Incubator" event--a chance for small and teacher-led ed tech start-ups to demonstrate their projects.
The Library 2.012 worldwide virtual conference is tentatively scheduled for October 3 - 5!

BLOG POSTS / RECORDINGS

The recordings are now posted for last week's interviews with Melia Dicker ("Reschool Yourself") and Lisa Nielsen ("An Out-of-the-Box Conversation on Education"). Terrific conversations!

COMMUNITY NEWS

The Future of Education interview series takes a holiday break after this week, returning in January with Scott McLeod and Ian Jukes.
We Collaborate has become the official user network for Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate and Wimba) users. Join us to trade tips and tricks with other Collaborate users. December 31 LearnCentral.org will officially be closed down.

THE WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters (Hack Education) sits down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

Here's the direct link to our latest podcast: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/WattersHargadon2011-12-10.mP3. The podcast feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation.

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

Live Interview Thursday, December 15th - Blue Valley Schools Great Industry-Education Partnership

2011-12-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

Join me Thursday, December 15th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com panel discussion with students, teachers, and business leaders involved in the Blue Valley Schools - CAPS Program. CAPS, the Blue Valley's Center for Advanced Professional Studies in Kansas, brings juniors and seniors from all Blue Valley high schools for a "unique learning opportunity to deeply explore their interests in a profession-based learning approach." Designed to inspire students to succeed in Bioscience, Business, Engineering, and Human Services, CAP brings together industry and education for student-driven learning through authentic problem-based work projects. "CAPS is all about students solving real problems, with real tools (used by real professionals), being mentored by real employers, leading to real contribution."

Date: Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-12-15.1718.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/caps.mp3.

More information about CAPS, with news and video clips, is available at http://www.bvcapsalumni.org.

Live Interview Tuesday, December 13th - David Maxfield on the Five Crucial Conversations That Drive Educational Excellence

2011-12-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Join me Tuesday, December 13th, for a special live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with David Maxfield, coauthor of two New York Times bestsellers, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success and Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. David will draw from his academic and business background to discuss the lesson of counter-intuitive courage which is required to avoid teacher burnout and to help effect educational change--and the five crucial conversations that therefore drive educational excellence.

Date: Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-12-13.1303.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/davidmaxfield.mp3.

For more than twenty years, David Maxfield has led high-leverage research initiatives that uncover causes of and solutions to managerial, cultural, and operational inefficiencies that directly affect the bottom line. David’s career began with his doctoral work in psychology at Stanford University. Since then, his impact on organizational performance has been wide-reaching as he’s helped clients such as General Mills, Harvard Medical School, Pizza Hut, and Spectrum Health increase organizational effectiveness and become measurably more vital.

David is the coauthor of two New York Times bestsellers, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success and Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. A respected academic, David has taught at Stanford University and the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. David is the recipient of the Motorola University’s Distinguished Teaching Award and Stanford University’s Dean’s Award for Innovative Industrial Education.

Currently, David is the vice president of research at VitalSmarts, an innovative corporate training company that teaches skills which deliver significant improvements to the results companies care about most. In the past thirty years, VitalSmarts has helped thousands of organizations, including more than three hundred of the Fortune 500, realize widespread and lasting results through its award-winning training programs. Named the 2008 Business of the Year by The Association of Learning Providers, VitalSmarts has also been ranked four times by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America and has taught two million people worldwide.

As vice president of research, David has led a series of research projects on a variety of subjects including the role crucial conversations play in the healthcare industry, and how the ongoing failure rate within enterprise projects is consistently linked to the avoidance of a few key crucial conversations. David has also led research projects about diversity, leadership, and influence.

Edublog Award Nominations and Time to Vote!

2011-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

Voting is now open for the 2011 Edublog Awards. The nominations are up, and you can vote until 11:59pm US Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, December 13th.

Here are the Steve Hargadon / Web 2.0 Labs projects that were nominated, with some encouragement to vote in these and all the categories!

Best Use of a Social Network

Classroom 2.0, which has received several nominations over the years and won twice, is on the list again. At 62,000 members, and pretty much the grandaddy of Ning social networking in education, it's still fun to see how it opens the door to seeing the value of social networking for professional development. Vote for it or one of the other great networks HERE.

Not making the cut this year but still worth visiting I think are: The Teacher 2.0 Mightybell social learning experience and Ning network, Aula 2.0 (huge contributors to the Global Education Conference), and Library 2.0 (which grew from 5,000 to 12,500 members this year).

Best Open PD / Unconference / Webinar Series

I was actually really sorry to see these categories lumped together this year, as they seem so different to me--at least the Unconference and Webinar Series. Nominated are:

Classroom 2.0 Live. This is the terrific Saturday show with Peggy George, Kim Caise, and Lorna Constantini. Great work, ladies!

Future of Education. This is my complete professional indulgence: find interesting people and interview them. A great, great body of thinkers and doers.

The Global Education Conference. Lucy Gray and I teamed up again for another amazing five days of sessions worldwide. An unbelievable volunteer effort this year, combined with great sessions and an AMAZING keynote lineup Lucy put together.

Library 2.011. A first-year virtual conference with the support of the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science. Incredible all the way around.

To vote in this category for one of the above or one of the other GREAT nominees, go HERE. It was very fun for me to note that I helped provide Elluminate/Collaborate resources for five others of the nominees: Giftedkids.ie, Reform Symposium, Australia Series, TL Virtual Cafe, and Tech Talk Tuesdays. Way to go, folks!

Not in the final nominations in this category, to my great surprise and profound disappointment, was EduBloggerCon, the all-day unconference before ISTE that I like to think really started the unconference (and some regular conference) movement in ed tech. :( ISTEunplugged, also something I'm proud of, didn't make it either.

Lifetime Achievement

I am nominated in this category--I was hoping I had a fighting chance until I saw the incredible list. :) To vote, go HERE.

Live Thursday: An "Out of the Box" Conversation on Education with Lisa Nielsen

2011-12-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

Join me Thursday, December 8th, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar as Lisa Nielsen, "The Innovative Educator," joins us for a conversation on a variety of "out of the box" topics, including using cell phones to enhance learning, child-centered and customized learning, the changing role of teachers, "hacking" education, learning without teachers or grade levels, schooling that hurts children, opting out of school, home education, and more!

Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively and is frequently covered by local and national media for her views on “Passion (not data) Driven Learning,” "Thinking Outside the Ban" to harness the power of technology for learning, and using the power of social media to provide a voice to educators and students. Ms. Nielsen has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. In addition to her award-winning blog, The Innovative Educator, Ms. Nielsen’s writing is featured in places such as Huffington Post, Tech & Learning, ISTE Connects, ASCD Wholechild, MindShift, Leading & Learning, The Unplugged Mom, and is the author the book Teaching Generation Text.

Date: Thursday, December 8th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-12-08.1501.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/lisanielsen.mp3.

Live Tuesday: A Conversation with Melia Dicker of "Reschool Yourself"

2011-12-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Join me Tuesday, December 6th, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar as Melia Dicker joins us for a conversation about education change--both personal and institutional. At age 28, Melia spent a year retracing her steps through her education from kindergarten through college in order to reboot her life and make a fresh start. She called the project Reschool Yourself and documented the experience on her blog (www.reschoolyourself.com). Melia spent four years as Co-Founder and Co-Director of Spark, a California nonprofit organization that matches youth with apprenticeships in their dream jobs. She is currently the Communications Director of IDEA, the Institute for Democratic Education in America, which collaborates with communities around the country to reclaim and reinvent education.

Date: Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is available at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-12-06.1705.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/meliadicker.mp3.

Live Interview Thursday: Panel on Search Literacy with Google's Tasha Bergson-Michelson

2011-11-29T08:43:00.000-08:00

Join me Thursday, December 1st, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar as Tasha Bergson-Michelson brings Debbie Abilock and Jole Seroff together for a panel and audience conversation on "search literacy" in education: what is search literacy, what sources should students be using, how do we help them evaluate what they find, what are the biggest misconceptions about search, and what is the school's role in teaching search literacy and skills?

Additionally, the panel wants to address:

Now that we can search for information, do we need to learn facts?
Is everything we need online?
How do you teach students to recognize when a source fits their need?
How do you teach students to be resilient in their technology use, especially in the face of web resources tools, which change all the time?

This should be a great conversation. Come with your ideas and questions.

Date: Thursday, December 1st, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-12-01.0600.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at audio.edtechlive.com/foe/searchliteracy.mp3.

Tasha Bergson-Michelson is a Search Education Curriculum Fellow at Google. Drawing on seventeen years as a librarian and research skills trainer in K-20 and corporate settings, Tasha collaborates with educators who want to integrate research skills into their classes to help their students access the most relevant, highest-quality sources available today.

Jole Seroff is Director of Library and Academic Technology at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA, an independent school for girls in grades 6 through 12. She has previously served as librarian in urban public schools in Memphis, TN. Her work involves collaborating with teachers to situate the learning of information and technology skills in the context of classroom curricula.

Debbie Abilock has over 30 years of experience in independent schools as an administrator, curriculum coordinator, librarian and director of a unified technology and library department. As a principle and content developer at NoodleTools, a company whose software supports the teaching and learning of academic research, she understands the new challenges educators face in teaching students to find and evaluate credible sources. She conducts training in schools on curriculum design, assessment, and inquiry research. She has been honored as a Library of Congress American Memory Fellow, a Library Journal Mover & Shaker, and has received Time Magazine’s Grand Prize Award for innovative Internet curriculum. However, her favorite “prize” is the opportunity to teach a class of third graders!

2011 Edublog Awards - Nominations Due by Friday!

2011-11-29T06:47:00.000-08:00

I have the pleasure again this year of co-hosting the annual Edublog Awards, designed to promote the educational value of social media. I encourage you to consider nominating someone or a site for an award in one of the eighteen categories, and to do so this week!

Here are the Web 2.0 Labs projects I hope you'll consider nominating:

Future of Education interview series for "Best Open PD / unconference / webinar series"
Classroom 2.0 community for "Best educational use of a social network"
Classroom 2.0 LIVE! interview series for "Best Open PD / unconference / webinar series"
Aula 2.0 community for "Best educational use of a social network"
Teacher 2.0 community and free online course for "Best educational use of a social network"
Library 2.0 community for "Best educational use of a social network"
Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference for "Best Open PD / unconference / webinar series"
2011 Global Education Conference for "Best Open PD / unconference / webinar series"
EduBloggerCon for "Best Open PD / unconference / webinar series"
ISTE Unplugged for "Best Open PD / unconference / webinar series"
ADDITION: The Hack Education weekly podcast with Audrey Watters

After the nominations close on Friday, public voting will take place until December 13th, and the award ceremony will be live in Blackboard Collaborate at 7pm US-Eastern Time Wednesday, December 14th.

Here's the announcement from the official Edublog Awards site:

The Edublog Awards is a community based incentive started in 2004 in response to community concerns relating to how schools, districts and educational institutions were blocking access of learner and teacher blog sites for educational purposes. The purpose of the Edublog awards is promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media. The best aspects include that it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners while creating an invaluable resource of the best-of-the-best on the web!
How To Nominate
To nominate your favorites, we’re following the same approach as the last three years, namely asking you to:
Write a post with your nominations for the different categories on your own blog (or a website – anywhere public)

Send us the link to your nomination post via the form at the bottom of the Nominations Page

And we’ve made some changes to categories this year such as:
Some categories have been combined together (Best ed tech / resource sharing blog and Best educational use of audio / video / visual /podcast)

We’ve created two new categories (Best open PD / unconference / webinar series and Best free web tool)

Virtual worlds are encouraged to be part of the expanded “social network” category
Here are the categories in full – nominations are open from now until Friday 2 December, and voting will then be up until Tuesday 13 December and the ceremony will be rocking on Wednesday 14 December!
So go nominate your favourite blogs, twitterers, community sites, videos, podcasts and more… for 2011:
Best individual blog
Best individual tweeter
Best group blog
Best new blog
Best class blog
Best student blog
Best ed tech / resource sharing blog
Most influential blog post
Best twitter hashtag
Best teacher blog
Best librarian / library blog
Best School Administrator blog
Best free web tool
Best educational use of audio / video / visual / podcast
Best educational wiki
Best open PD / unconference / webinar series
Best educational use of a social network
Lifetime achievement

This Week: Kindle Fire Education Review, GlobalEdCon Recordings, Community News, and the Hack Education Roundup and Podcast!

2011-11-21T13:13:00.000-08:00

Welcome to week six of this new weekly blog post / email, including the round-up of the week's news and the always-fun podcast with Audrey Watters in which we really drill down on the Amazon Kindle Fire (see my blog post below as well).

ANNOUNCEMENTS + EVENTS

The 5-day, 300+ session 2011 Global Education Conference wrapped up on Friday, and the recordings are available now here in both HTML and spreadsheet form! As well, the recent Library 2.011 conference recordings are here.
SXSWEdu (South by Southwest Education) announced their first list of 50 accepted concurrent sessions and panels proposals for the 2012 conference, March 6 - 8, in Austin, Texas. My panel proposal "School 2.0" was accepted, the topic being the role that teachers should and will play in the future of the education reform dialog (with panelists Stephanie Sandler, Thomas Ho, and Donna Murdoch). I'm still waiting to on two other panels I proposed (one on "hacking" your education, the other on the dangers of "red herring" tech solutions to education). Based on the list of sessions already accepted, this promises to be a very interesting conference where many of the cutting ed-tech discussions will be taking place--discussions that aren't always at the traditional ed tech conferences. Hmmm...
I'm giving the keynote address next week at the DET/CHE 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, an event for leaders in educational technology in California higher education.
I know it's early, but be sure to start thinking about the ISTE 2012 conference in San Diego. This will be the fifth year of EduBloggerCon, which is being renamed SocialEdCon and will now incorporate our other great events at ISTE: the Bloggers' Cafe and ISTEUnplugged. More details coming soon, but be sure to put Saturday, June 23rd, into your calendar for when you are making your travel plans! And this year, let's make sure that this event draws in the Library 2.0 crowd--something I really want to see happen more often.
Also on early radar--Lucy Gray and I are talking about a Global Education Summit physical meeting, also to precede ISTE... we plan to chew up your summer days in the most pleasant of ways, but at least our events are free!

BLOG POSTS

I take an in-depth look at the new Amazon Kindle Fire from the perspective of education. Upshot: great but unrealized potential, and lots of questions about student accounts.

COMMUNITY NEWS

The Future of Education interview series returns tomorrow (Tuesday, November 22nd) from our virtual conference break for an interview with Scott Nine, the Executive Director of IDEA, the Institute for Democratic Education in America. More information here.
The recording of this past Saturday's Classsroom 2.0 LIVE! show with featured teacher Beth Still has been posted. Classroom 2.0 will not meet until December 3rd in observance of the Thanksgiving Holiday in the US. The topic for Saturday, December 3rd will be ”Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?” by author Julie Ramsay. Julie will share the ways she uses technology, tools and resources with to motivate students and re-energize writing instruction.
I'll be meeting next week with Gina Bianchini, co-founder of Ning and creator of the new MightyBell that's hosting the new Teacher 2.0 self-paced, free online workshop. We're going to brainstorm how her social teaching and learning program could best help educators.
In December, We Collaborate becomes the official user network for Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate and Wimba) users. Come to trade tips and tricks with other Collaborate users. December 31 LearnCentral.org will officially be closed down.
Community Numbers: If numbers equate to finding interesting people, which they often do, these number may be of interest. Library 2.0 has reached over 12,500 members from 153 countries, growing almost 7,000 members since the Library 2.011 conference was announced earlier in the year. Classroom 2.0 is at almost 62,000 members from an incredible 181 countries. Teacher 2.0 is growing more slowly with almost 2,800 members (a cutting edge-group!), while the ever-small Student 2.0 is seeing a rash of student sign-ups from Ohio and France for cultural exchanges. The Future of Education will reach 7,000 members this week or next.

THE WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters (Hack Education) sits down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

Here's the direct link to our latest podcast: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/WattersHargadon2011-18-11.mp3. The podcast feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

Live Interview Tuesday November 22nd - Scott Nine from IDEA on Reclaiming and Reinventing Education

2011-11-21T11:36:00.000-08:00

Join me Tuesday, November 22nd, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Scott Nine, the Executive Director of IDEA, the Institute for Democratic Education in America. IDEA is a national effort "to unite education with our nation’s democratic values" and they believe that "young people ought to be active co-creators of their own learning and valued participants in a vibrant learning community." We'll talk about democractic education, building momentum for education change, and where and how he sees healthy change in education coming.

Date: Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-11-22.1722.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/scottnine.mp3.

Scott Nine is the Executive Director of IDEA. A dynamic public speaker and organizer, he enjoys teaching and learning about leadership, social justice, community, educational reform, environmental sanity, personal growth, entrepreneurship, and how we get along with one another. Scott has a Masters Degree in Social Work from Arizona State University. He has experience teaching, advising, and creating learning communities for people ages 5 to 95. Raised by two public school educators, Scott fell in love with his partner Hollie while growing up in Apache Junction, Arizona. He lives in Portland, Oregon where Kristofer, KD, and Ellanore teach him new lessons on an almost daily basis.

From the IDEA Website: "IDEA is a national effort to unite education with our nation’s democratic values. We believe that young people ought to be active co-creators of their own learning and valued participants in a vibrant learning community. This is democratic education in action, which as you know is sharply different from the reality experienced by most young people and educators throughout the country...

"IDEA is committed to bridging the disconnect between our democratic values and the way we educate and treat young people. This disconnect is striking, as the learning experience today is largely determined by a standardized, high-stakes, and de-personalized approach that alienates young people from learning and drives gifted teachers out of the profession.

"In contrast, democratic education starts from the premise that every young person is unique, and that all young people ought to have the opportunity to live and learn in an environment that practices meaningful participation, that supports self-initiative in learning, and that is directed towards greater equality and social justice...

"IDEA defines democratic education as learning that equips every human being to participate fully in a healthy democracy. We believe that in a democracy based on participation of each individual, education should also be democratic.

"A democracy is a system in which the people have power and are able to exercise it. Democratic education incorporates the principles of a healthy democracy: students have an active role in shaping their own learning, rather than being passive recipients of knowledge. They are participants and citizens, each with unique gifts, not empty vessels or products on an assembly line....

"IDEA collaborates with communities around the country to reclaim and reinvent education, in ways that develop compassionate citizens and changemakers."

The Kindle Fire - So Close... A Review with Education in Mind

2011-11-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

I have had really high hopes for the Kindle Fire, as an Android tablet lover, especially as it might work as an education device. Amazon is big enough and well-positioned enough to bring to market an inexpensive tablet that combines 1) a virtually unlimited library of public domain and traditional books with 2) access to the Web, and 3) an open development app platform. I recognize and appreciate how much the "wow" factor plays a big role in the adoption of the iPad in education, and that an Amazon device is not going to elicit the same reaction--but I'm not sure it needs to if the solid learning functionality over time proves itself.

My own 10" Acer Android tablet (the A500), which I bought only because it was on sale at Staples at the still-amazing price of $299, has become my primary learning device in a way that I didn't anticipate. I've basically stopped using my netbook computer, which indicates that the form factor and size, more than the capabilities, must have been the hidden heart of the netbook's appeal to me. While the tablet is not a great device for creation, which I still do at traditional PCs, the world of knowledge that the tablet conveniently opens to me every day is stunning in scope. I really want that for my own children and for our students.

Having played with a Fire for several hours, I am if anything only more convinced of its potential in education, but less sure that Amazon is taking the product in a direction to realize that promise. I might try to put aside the fact that my own personal work habits are so tied to Google that I won't actually use the Kindle Fire myself as a primary device (more below), but even then the degree to Fire presents an Apple-like integrated/locked-in experience ultimately leaves me uncomfortable evangelizing it to education right now. My Acer tablet has much of the same integration with Google, but without the lock-in.

Intriguingly, though, there's another side to this: that Fire is more Apple than Android--more locked-down with less work getting started--might actually make it more attractive to schools and parents. I'd have to see what the implications are for giving Fire to a student or child (do they get their own Amazon account? do they have to have the right to make purchases? can I put their Fire on my Amazon account, and if I do so will they have unlimited access to ordering books/movies/music?), but this control could make entry into the student market much easier even if I don't personally like it.

More details below, plus Audrey Watters shared her thoughts about the Kindle fire here, and she and I discuss it at length in our weekly ed tech roundup podcast which will be released on Monday.

First Impressions

Minimalist packaging, loved it. Classy, but not over the top.
The Kindle Fire recognized me, probably from hardware spec tied to my order with Amazon. Very nice, meaning it brought in all my Amazon content. Much like Android tablets automatically bring in all your Google content (Gmail, contacts, app purchases), Fire linked to all all my Amazon content (books, music, and video).
It found wifi right off the bat, connecting to my network was painless.
After it downloaded an update automatically, I was up and running in a few minutes. Here again, more Apple than Android in the user experience setting up.
Every time I pick up the device to use, it's pretty much instant-on, which is very nice. It's made me realize that my Android phone and Acer tablet are actually a little sluggish there.

Overall

The price point ($199) is a huge plus in its favor.
Interestingly, by being more than a Kindle, it almost feels like less... Because this is a integrated media device (Amazon video and music, Audible audio book), it left me wanting more because it gave me more. By adding so much additional functionality, I realized how locked in I was to Amazon compared to a traditional Android device.
Amazon would really benefit, I think, by focusing this device on education in some way. This would make a LOT of sense for giving the device a mission/purpose. I don't see that yet. If there were a compelling reason for school adoption--either content or capability--I think the price point would make it a no-brainer for parents and teachers.

Amazon Integration

This is an Amazon, not Google, integrated android device. I'm so wed to Google that I miss the Google apps and other pieces not authorized by Amazon. But it also makes me realize the degree to which my love affair with my tablet is in part because of my deep Google usage. Right off the bat I miss Google Maps, Google Music, and Skype.
There is value in the unified Amazon experience. It's easy to navigate, and much simpler than my Android tablet--at the cost of being a less fulfilling device for a power user.
The Audible integration to Amazon has been a bonus for me just as customer, and is added to on Fire. However, because audible allows you to download audio books (I love this on my Android phone!), I immediately realized that I can't do the same thing with an Amazon movie that I rent or buy, so I can only watch a movie on Fire if I'm connected to a wireless network (in other words, not on a plane or in a car).

Books

I am interested to see if this continues, but I actually found my eyes more tired after reading on Fire than reading on my phone or my Acer tablet. I actually had trouble focusing when looking at reviews in the Kindle store. That would be a little bit of a deal-killer for me as a read.
I've lamented the fact that as a Google Prime member who orders lots of books both electronic and physical, and an active user of the Kindle software on my phone and Android tablet, I haven't had access to the new Kindle lending library because it requires and actual Kindle device. So having a Fire comes with the added bonus of being able to borrow a book each month.
Also a little unrelated to the Fire itself, I still wish that book samples would synch between devices. I use the book sample feature basically as a way to collect potential purchases, like I would browse in a bookstore, and having those samples on different devices means I never really drill down on most of them.
I do a lot of PDF and other non-Kindle reading on my Acer tablet, and I have no interest in trying to figure out how to do this on Fire within Kindle, as I'd be shocked if Amazon will make it easy for me to do... which make the lack of any external memory understandable. My Acer has full USB and micro-SD.

Amazon App Store

I've never liked the whole Amazon app store idea, since one of the great features of apps on Android is that the system is seamless over multiple personal devices. Amazon's app store, by design, doesn't know what apps I'm already using, doesn't know which ones I've paid for already, and doesn't carry some of the ones I use the most.
My Android-using 13-year-old daughter, who's been coveting the iPhone recently, grabbed the Fire, looked at the games installed, and immediately said: I wouldn't want an iPhone if I had a Fire. That surprised me, and I haven't looked in detail at the games available, but am guessing this is the response Amazon wanted!

Browser

For all the talk about the Silk browser, this was a real disappointment to me. I know it's supposed to "learn" and speed up over time, but right off the bat it didn't feel any faster than my good Android browsers.
A major downfall of the browser is that the top and bottom panels eat up so much real estate that in landscape mode I just didn't want to even read the web pages. Maybe I just couldn't figure it out, but I was not able to make the panels auto-hide.
Honestly, I just won't use the browser now if given a choice to use another device.

Movies

Acknowledging the frustration of having to be on a wireless connection, watching an Amazon movie this way is a very experience.
Of course, they are not likely to let me watch Netflix on Fire. :) (UPDATE: To Amazon's great credit, the Netflix app is available on the fire.) Netflix is available on my Android phone, but not on my tablet. I can watch Amazon movies on my tablet using Flash, but it's not a great experience. So what's obvious here is that the movie piece is a big strategic play, and candidly, that's what worried me--the focus and attention on this will detract from the (to me) more important educational opportunities.

Email

The Gmail experience is so amazing on my 10" Acer tablet, and so bad on Fire, that I deleted my account within about 5 minutes and didn't even consider using this device for email.

Other

Again, I'm really interested in how student accounts would work--do they have to be on their own, with a form of payment involved? If my child has a separate account and I buy a book for him or her, will I also have access to that book? This is my next research area, as I imagine this is going to be complicated for parents and am hoping that Amazon surprises me and they have some good solutions here.
Like all Android devices, this also suffers from non-multiple user capability.
Fire uses the standard micro USB for power charging, which is a HUGE plus for someone always having to think about what cables I need to have when and where. But the power cord is way short--what is that all about?
Because there is no Google Map, I probably won't miss GPS, but it's not there. But it also comes in handy for apps that benefit from knowing where you are (weather and movies, for example).
No 3G of course
Anecdotal, of course, but the UPS guy who delivered my device, when asked if he'd been delivering many, asked what the Kindle Fire was. Since the name is printed on the box, and the packaging is unique, I guessed my was his only delivery that day. He confirmed that when I showed him the box.

November 14 - Ed Tech News, Our Weekly Podcast, and the Hack Education Roundup!

2011-11-14T12:50:00.000-08:00

Welcome to week five of this new weekly blog post / email, including the round-up of the week's news and podcast with Audrey Watters.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The 2011 Global Education Conference has begun! Come sign up--it's free! In it's second year, this amazing five-day, 24-hour-a-day event helps educators and students connect with each other and with global education programs all over the world. The session schedule is up in all 36 time zones. Recordings of sessions are going live as soon as the sessions are finished--look for the "QUICK LINKS AND RECORDINGS" page.

EVENTS

The Future of Education interview series will be on short hiatus during the two virtual conferences, but then will return on Tuesday, November 22nd, when my guest will be Scott Nine from IDEA to talk about democratic education. New additions to the already-amazing guest schedule are Henry Eyring on The Innovative University, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, and Cable Green on "public funding should equal openly-licensed resources."
The recordings of recent FutureofEducation.com shows are posted: Mark Surman from Mozilla on the Open Badges project, David Loertscher on Library 2.0, Gina Bianchini on Mightybell, Tim Wilson on Redirect, Peter Cookson on a Children's Education Bill of Rights, and more!
The Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show is back! Peggy, Lorna, and Kim host Beth Still, who will share the ways she uses technology with her students and teachers that she works with in her unique setup including Moodle.

THE WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters (Hack Education) sits down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

Here's the direct link to our latest podcast: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/WattersHargadon2011-11-11.mp3. The podcast feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

The Second Annual Global Education Conference Starts Monday!

2011-11-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

It's almost here! The second annual Global Education Conference is a week-long, and free, event bringing together educators and innovators from around the world. The conference features sessions and keynote addresses to inspire global connections, projects, ideas, and action in an increasingly connected world.

We'll be streaming live online November 14-18, 2011 (the actual session links will get posted this weekend). The entire conference will be held online for free using the Blackboard Collaborate platform (formerly known as Elluminate/Wimba). The session descriptions, forum discussions, and session calendars (one for each of the world's 36 time zones!) are available at http://www.globaleducationconference.com. Look at last year's reviews, check out this year's awesome sessions and keynotes, and get yourself set for a ton of fun and learning--join us if you can!

More Information:

The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to signiﬁcantly increase opportunities for building education-related connections around the globe while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity. The conference seeks to present ideas, examples, and projects related to connecting educators and classrooms with a strong emphasis on promoting global awareness, fostering global competency, and inspiring action towards solving real–world problems. Through this event, it is our hope that attendees will challenge themselves and others to become more active citizens of the world. Let us learn, question, create, and engage in meaningful, authentic opportunities within a global context!

Keynote addresses this year will be given by noted thought leaders Alan November Chris Dede, Howard Gardner, Fernando Reimers, Esther Wojcicki, and many more. Conference sponsors include Brainpop and iEARN-USA Partner organizations are numerous as well and many will be presenting their work throughout the conference. Last year’s conference featured 387 sessions and 60 keynote addresses from 62 countries with over 15,000 participant logins. Sessions were held in multiple time zones and multiple languages over the ﬁve days, and are currently archived as a standing educational resource at http://globaledcon.weebly.com/recordings.html. For further information, please join our network at http://
globaleducationconference.com and follow us on Twitter (@GlobalEdCon). Conference related tweets will be aggregated using the hashtag #GlobalEd11.

November 7 - Ed Tech News, Our Weekly Podcast, and the Hack Education Roundup!

2011-11-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

Welcome to week four of this new weekly blog post / email, including the round-up of the week's news and podcast with Audrey Watters. If you haven't listened to a podcast yet, we think they are a blast and hope that you do as well!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference was a huge success, and all of the session recordings are posted on the site!

EVENTS

The 2011 Global Education Conference is next week: November 14 - 18. Come sign up--it's free! In it's second year, this amazing five-day, 24-hour-a-day event helps educators and students connect with each other and with global education programs all over the world. The session schedule is up in all 36 time zones! We are still looking for moderator volunteers, if you would like to help (see the link for volunteers on the main page).
The Future of Education interview series will be on short hiatus during the two virtual conferences, but then will return on Tuesday, November 22nd, when my guest will be Scott Nine from IDEA to talk about democratic education. New additions to the already-amazing guest schedule are Henry Eyring on The Innovative University, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, and Cable Green on "public funding should equal openly-licensed resources."
The Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show is back! Peggy, Lorna, and Kim host the Conference Co-Conveners and Organizers of the "2011 K12 Online Conference" who will share and tempt you a with lively discussion of upcoming topics that the presenters will include in their presentations and keynotes.
The recordings of recent FutureofEducation.com shows are posted: Mark Surman from Mozilla on the Open Badges project, David Loertscher on Library 2.0, Gina Bianchini on Mightybell, Tim Wilson on Redirect, Peter Cookson on a Children's Education Bill of Rights, and more!

THE WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters (Hack Education) sits down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

Here's the direct link to our latest podcast: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/WattersHargadon2011-11-05.mp3. The podcast feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

The Great "Learning 2.0" Strand Brainstorm

2011-10-31T14:54:00.000-07:00

Like the Library 2.011 and GlobalEdCon conferences, I'm planning on holding a (free) worldwide virtual Future of Education: Learning 2.0 conference January 23 - 27, 2012. When you look at the brainstorm list below for conference strands, you are probably going to react as I have: "Wow, that seems really ambitious!" However, inspired by my FutureofEducation.com interview series and and consistently amazing guests, it seems like we're ready for this kind of bold event. I'm somewhat stunned by the power and potential of these events to bring together people and ideas from around the world, and I think the time is now to talk on a larger scale.

You are going to find several gaps below that largely reflect my own lack of experience in some categories. You may find other places where you disagree with my idea, or wording, or categorization (which is why I'm posting this discussion!) What would you add? What would you take away? What would you alter? I'm posting this same discussion on Google+, and feel free to answer here or there (at Google+, there's more opportunity for back-and-forth with others).

ALSO: Let me know what individuals and organizations would you want to make sure I reached out to for this event. Who would you want to make sure was participating? Who would make good partners or sponsors?

So, here's my tentative Learning 2.0 conference strand brainstorm. I've purposely left out the library and global education categories because of the other two conference. A call for proposals will go out November 15th, with rolling acceptances based on submission dates through January 10th, and applications for the international advisory board will be open at the same time (be sure to join FutureofEducation.com to stay informed).

Classroom 2.0

Web 2.0 and Social media in the classroom (Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, Podcasting, etc.)
1:1 Programs: laptops, netbooks, iPads, and tablets
"Flipped" learning
Rethinking Homeworl

School 2.0

Education Reform
The role of business in education
Social media and shifts in narrative power / grassroots education change
Changes in school governance models
The impact of computer technology on administration and planning
Testing and assessment
Democratic education movements: freedom, control, and the role of schools
School architecture
Entrepreneurship for education / commercial ed tech
Disruptive innovation

Digital Learning

The role of social networking in education
Digital Portfolios
Program or Be Programmed (programming)
21st century skills / Digital Literacies
The downsides of Digital

Teacher / Faculty 2.0

Personal Learning Networks
Social Professional Development
Social networking
Peer-generated PD

Student 2.0

Personalized / individualized learning
Student-directed Learning / Hacking Education / DIY
Student Learning Networks
Passion-based learning
Participatory learning
Informal learning
Personal Learning Plans / Learning styles
Authentic Learning / Apprenticeships
Student-generated content
Personal Web Presences / Personal "Branding"

Distance / Online Learning

Learning Management Systems

Virtual / Immersive Environments

Second Life
Virtual Reality

Gaming in Education

Games and learning

Pedagogy

The history of learning ideas
Reawakening alternative pedagogies
Great voices in education
The impact of technology on pedagogy
Progressivism, Constructivism, Constructionism, etc.

Mobile Learning

Handheld / Tablet

Open Learning

Open Education Resources
Open Source Software in Ed
Creative Commons
Open PD
Digital Textbooks

University / College / Higher Ed 2.0
Brain Research

Cognitive/Brain Tools (Howard Rheingold)
Deliberate Practice
Exercise and Learning

Alternative Education and Assessment Models

Homeschooling
Unschooling
Open Badges Project

Additional

The Future of Books and Reading
Math 2.0

October 31 - Ed Tech News, Our Weekly Podcast, and the Hack Education Roundup!

2011-10-31T10:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome to week three of this new weekly blog post / email, including the round-up of the week's news and podcast with Audrey Watters. This is way, way too much fun. We hope you enjoy it!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference is this Wednesday and Thursday, November 2 - 4, all online, all free. As of today, we have 5,000 registrations for the conference from 151 countries! Amazing! The conference schedule is also now online, with all 160+ sessions, and an individual hour-by-hour schedule calendar for each of 36 different time zones--and the live links to the session rooms will go up later today and tomorrow. Be sure to register by joining the site at the link above.
The 2011 Global Education Conference is also fast approaching: November 14 - 18. In it's second year, this amazing five-day, 24-hour-a-day event helps educators and students connect with each other and with global education programs all over the world. The call for presentations was been extended until today, October 31, so get your proposals in quickly if you want to present, or join the website to register to participate.

EVENTS

The Future of Education interview series will be on short hiatus during the two virtual conferences, but then will return on Tuesday, November 22nd, when my guest will be Scott Nine from IDEA to talk about democratic education. New additions to the already-amazing guest schedule are Henry Eyring on The Innovative University, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, and Cable Green on "public funding should equal openly-licensed resources."
The Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show is back! Peggy, Lorna, and Kim host Darshan Somashekar and Neal Tapariam who will demonstrate the great features of using “EasyBib” to annotate and cite sources for bibliographies.
The recordings of recent FutureofEducation.com shows are posted: Mark Surman from Mozilla on the Open Badges project, David Loertscher on Library 2.0, Gina Bianchini on Mightybell, Tim Wilson on Redirect, Peter Cookson on a Children's Education Bill of Rights, and more!

THE WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters (Hack Education) sits down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

Here's the direct link to our third podcast: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/WattersHargadon2011-10-29.mp3. The podcast feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

HACK EDUCATION NEWS ROUNDUP

And here, in full, is the Hack Education weekly roundup, also available directly at Hack Education.

#OccupyEDU and Generation Debt

I've been struck by the prominence of education issues in the Occupy Wall Street movement. A sampling of stories and sites: Occupy Education. Occupy College. Occupy Scholarly Communications. Occupy the Laboratory. Occupy Librarianship. "Generation Debt at the Barricades." "How Does Occupy Wall Street Speak to a Broken Education System?"

President Obama introduced a plan this week to help students struggling to repay their student loans. Student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt to be the number 2 source of household debt (only behind the mortgage). Obama's plan will accelerate the relief from a law recently passed by Congress, reducing the maximum required payment on student loans from 15% of discretionary income annually to 10%. He will put it into effect in 2012, instead of 2014. And the new plan would have the remaining debt forgiven after 20 years instead of 25. (For more info -- maybe -- see the Department of Education press release.)

The Obama Administration also announced its support of a new program, conjunction with the Young Entrepreneur Council, to create a new startup incubator program and investment company: Gen Y Capital Partners. Not only will the program help fund those entrepreneurs under age 35, it will also tap into the new student debt adjustment program that the President unveiled.

Politics and Policies

Missouri governor Jay Nixon signed into law the revisions to the infamous Senate Bill 54, a law that would have effectively banned any private teacher-student interaction on social media sites. The new law doesn't contain these restrictions, but rather turns the decisions over social media policies to individual districts.

Accolades

Congratulations to the 2012 TED Fellows. A shout-out to the makers, artists, engineers, educators: DIY neuroscientist Greg Gage, Skillshare co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn, founder of 3D printing company Makerbot Bre Pettis, and Ayah Bdeir, artist, engineer and founder of littleBits (who I covered in a recent story on MindShift

Launches

The Royal Society has opened its archives -- over 60,000 peer-reviewed research articles, including a very famous experiment about an electrical kite.

Symtext launched its "liquid textbook" platform this week. It's a browser-based app that offers social reading, highlighting and sharing (and sharing just within classes as opposed to generally "public"). The notes sync across platforms. Currently the startup supports content from over a dozen academic publishers, including Wiley and McGraw-Hill.

New York's Betaworks unveiled findings, another new social reading, sharing, and discovery platform. The tool lets you share and comment on clips from the Kindle and from the Web and follow along with what others are reading.

Classes, Conferences, and Events

I ended my Startup Weekend EDU travel streak with a trip to DC. i've got write-up on Hack Education and on Mindshift. Even cooler? CodeNow, one of the startups that participated in the weekend, has a write-up on the White House blog.

Updates, Upgrades, and Pivots

Google announced that 15 million people now use Google Apps for Education. The company also made Google Plus available to its Apps for Education users, but only to its higher education customers as the 18-and-older age limit on G+ remains.

LearnBoost continues to roll out new languages thanks to its users crowdsourcing the translation efforts of the online gradebook. It's now available in Urdu, Romanian, and Vietnamese (in addition to Spanish, Dutch, and French).

The animation-making tool Xtranormal (known for some hilarious and often NSFW videos about Android versus iPhone), has launched a new Xtranormal for Educators platform. It features the easy-to-use tools for video production, combines it with a secure environment for classroom usage, for just $10 a month.

The human-powered search engine Mahalo announced a round of layoffs this week. The company has changed its focus several times over the past few years, most recently to focus on creating educational videos. Mahalo is shifting again, this time to concentrate on educational iOS apps, Techcrunch reports.

Disney-owned kids' virtual world Club Penguin has rolled out some new chat boxes that take advantage of a predictive engine, reports AllThingsD. It's the first change to the Club Penguin chat in about six years. The virtual world only lets kids use certain stock phrases, but by incorporating predictive text, the chat will work a bit like Google Instant, with autocompleting the phrases it thinks kids want to use.

Research and Data

EDUCAUSE 2011 was cause for a number of research-related announcements, including the release of the 2011 Campus Computing Project. Among its findings, more colleges are going mobile -- more than half of public universities and half of private ones have mobile apps. Universities' adoption of cloud computing has been slower. Just 4.4% of campuses say they've moved from on-premise to cloud solutions.

The Educause Center for Applied Research also released survey data about how college students use Facebook. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Nine out of 10 college students say they use Facebook for social purposes, like writing status updates and posting pictures. And the majority, 58 percent, say they feel comfortable using it to connect with other students to discuss homework assignments and exams. One out of four students even went so far as to say they think Facebook is “valuable” or “extremely valuable” to their academic success."

The cost of college is increasing. Again. The College Board has released the latest figures, finding that in-state tuition at four-year colleges is up 8.3%. It's up 4.5% at private colleges and up 3.2% at for-profit universities.

With all the talk about "data-driven education," it's still remarkably difficult to get schools to share data -- due to issues of privacy and perception. That in turn makes it difficult to have large datasets about student issues. But 6 institutions have federated their databases, creating a dataset that includes over 640,000 anonymized student records and over 3 million course level records, focusing on 33 common variables. The institutions represent public/private, two-year/four-year, and publicly-funded and proprietary institutions

Common Sense Media released a report this week on the amount of "screen time" that children are experiencing. No big surprise, the amount of time is up, with new devices like iPads joining what remains the dominant screen, the television. The report introduced a new term -- "the app gap" -- a growing divide between lower-income and higher-income children's access to and usage of apps. I looked more closely at this issue in a story for Edutopia.

Kathy Schrock has created a list of Android apps that target Bloom's revised taxonomy. Bloomin' Android is a companion site to an earlier project where she listed how fit into the taxonomy.

Funding

Codecademy, a Web-based site with JavaScript lessons, raised $2.5 million in investment this week. I respond harshly.

Last Call for 2011 Global Education Conference Proposals!

2011-10-29T22:51:00.000-07:00

Excitement is really building for the worldwide 2011 Global Education Conference (November 14 - 18), and this is a quick reminder that proposals for session presentations are due by the end of the day this Monday, October 31st. Submit HERE.

(To register to attend the conference, which is online and free, just join the network at http://www.globaledcon.com.)

We started accepting proposals this past week, and they are being approved in the order submitted. If your proposal is accepted, you then choose a time slot from the available times to present. This is to allow you to choose a day and time to present that are convenient to you. Potential presenters should also join the presenters group on the website to receive email announcements specific to presenters.

Awesome keynote session are starting to be announced, and the conference schedule is filling with a variety of general sessions (you can see them in your own time zone HERE). And there are badges, a poster, and press releases available on the Press and Promotional page of the network!

See you online!

Library 2.011 Worldwide Conference November 2-4

2011-10-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

We’re counting down the days until the inaugural (and free) Library 2.011 Worldwide Virtual Conference begins on Wednesday, November 2nd. More than 4,000 information professionals from 149 countries have signed up to join the global conversation on the current and future state of libraries. The groundbreaking event will be a whirlwind of information, with 160 presentations scheduled over two days!

The schedule of all sessions, in customized schedule pages for each of the world's 36 time zones, is now available at the Sessions and Schedule page. Presentations will cover a variety of pertinent subject strands that affect the LIS industry and the changing roles of libraries and librarians in our digital world. All sessions will also be recorded for later viewing. Keynote addresses will be scheduled over the course of the two-day conference, and the speakers include:

Dr. Sandra Hirsh (USA)
Dr. Lennart Bjoerneborn (Denmark)
Dr. Michael Stephens (USA)
Dr. Christine Bruce (Australia)
Ms. Ellen Tise (South Africa)
Mr. Stephen Abram (Canada)

To register for the conference, join the conference website at http://www.Library2011.com. The conference welcome will start at 6:30 a.m. US-PDT on Wednesday, November 2nd, followed by the opening keynote by Library 2.011 Co-Chair Dr. Sandra Hirsh, professor and director of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San José State University. The conference will conclude with a final conference gathering at 9:00 p.m. US-PDT on Thursday, November 3 (November 4, in some parts of the world). All conference sessions are being held in Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate), and can be accessed live from any personal computer following instructions on the Sessions and Schedule page.

Participants, presenters, and volunteers are encouraged to share your excitement for this global event. The conference Twitter hashtag is "#lib2011" and to download a variety of badges, please visit: http://www.library20.com/page/press-promotional. Those interested in volunteering will find information on the Volunteer Page, and potential sponsors still have time to sign up by contacting me directly.

As a reminder, the conference will be held entirely online, is FREE to attend, and will be recorded. For more information, please visit: http://www.library20.com.

See you online!

Live Interview Tuesday October 25th - Mike Marriner from Roadtrip Nation

2011-10-24T11:02:00.001-07:00

Join me Tuesday, October 25th, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Mike Marriner co-founder of Roadtrip Nation. "Roadtrip Nation began in 2001 as an idea Mike, Nathan, Brian and Amanda, four friends fresh out of college, formed when they were not sure what to do with their lives. Initially, the scope of the plan was relatively small – climb aboard an old RV, paint it green, and traverse the country with the purpose of interviewing people who inspired them by living lives that centered around what was meaningful to them. Along the way, the four realized that the conversations that they were having on the road could not remain within the confines of their own RV, but held relevancy that could be shared with a world that was losing the know-how of living lives that pulse on personal passion rather than someone else’s expectations." Roadtrip Nation now helps students take education out of classrooms and into the real world by encouraging them to find what they love, gather a team to interview people that inspire them in order to learn from their stories, and then to share these experiences with others.

Date: Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-10-25.1742.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/roadtripnation.mp3.

The Roadtrip Manifesto (click to enlarge):

Mike Marriner is RoadTrip Nation's Founder / Director of Strategic Partnerships. From his website bio:

How are you different than you were four years ago?
I fly on planes instead of driving in motor homes. But I still love it all.

How did you come to work at Roadtrip Nation?
That's complicated, is it really work?

I aspire to...
inspire people.

Miles on your odometer?
32 (Magic Johnson's number, YES).

Best conversation you've had while in a vehicle?
With my wife in Nepal.

What is your favorite place in the world and why?
Nepal – the people and the mountains.

October 24 - Ed Tech News, Our Weekly Podcast, and the Hack Education Roundup!

2011-10-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

Welcome to week two of this new weekly blog post / email, including the round-up of the week's news and podcast with Audrey Watters. We did try to keep the podcast a little shorter this week--although it wasn't easy--to much to talk about, and too fun!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The South by Southwest Edu (SXSWedu) session proposals are now online for community comment (what they call the PanelPicker): http://panelpicker.sxswedu.com. Commenting closes in four days, and while the comments are only a portion of the selection process, it's fun to see the sessions and to let your voice be heard. The system is a little weird, since you can't see all of the proposals in one area (they are categorized into primary, secondary, and tertiary blocks based on arbitrary ordering of session submissions by one individual), but here are direct links to panel proposals I made: "School 2.0: Teachers and the Future of Education" (the importance of teacher voice in education discussions, "Hack Your Education" (thinking about self-directed learning--Audrey's in this proposal), and "Technology, Pedagogy, and the Silver Bullet" (addressing the myopia of some ed tech business ventures). I'm also a proposed panelist for "Education2.0 - Social Media Drives Student Success" being hosted by Jennifer Openshaw.
The Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference starts in just over a week! November 2 - 4, all online, all free. The conference schedule is now online, with all 160+ sessions, and an individual hour-by-hour schedule calendar for all 36 time zones. No matter where you are in the world you can see the schedule in your own time.
The 2011 Global Education Conference is also fast approaching: November 14 - 18. In it's second year, this amazing five-day, 24-hour-a-day event helps educators and students connect with each other and with global education programs all over the world. The call for presentations has been extended until October 31, so get your proposals in!

EVENTS

This Thursday, as part of the Future of Education interview series, my guest will be Mike Marriner from Roadtrip Nation, the fascinating program to empower students to get out into their communities and connect what they learn to their real world.
The Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show is back! Peggy, Lorna, and Kim host “Featured Teacher” Bryan Jackson, a high school gifted-education and music teacher in Coquitlam, British Columbia.
The recordings of recent FutureofEducation.com shows are posted: Mark Surman from Mozilla on the Open Badges project, David Loertscher on Library 2.0, Gina Bianchini on Mightybell, Tim Wilson on Redirect, Peter Cookson on a Children's Education Bill of Rights, and more!

THE WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters (Hack Education) sits down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

Our second podcast is "in the can," and here's the direct link: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/WattersHargadon2011-10-21.mp3. The podcast feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

HACK EDUCATION NEWS ROUNDUP

And here, in full, is the Hack Education weekly roundup, also available directly at Hack Education.

Politics and Policies

This week marks the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Department of Education Organization Act, the law signed by President Jimmy Carter that created the Department of Education. GOOD's Liz Dwyer has a great post asking a question that's on a lot of people's minds: do we still need a Department of Education?

The Senate Education Committee began work this week sifting through the 800-some-odd-page reauthorization for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The last revision to the law gave us No Child Left Behind. Senators on the Education Committee and their staff are now tasked with marking up the legislation with various changes and amendments. Oh, what will they give us this time?!

Meanwhile, the Senate did vote on Tuesday to block an Obama administration proposal that would have limited the amount of potatoes served in school lunches. Yes, I know it's not technology news, but somehow it's indicative enough of other trends that I'm including it here.

Launches

BioCurious, a hackerspace for biotech, officially opened its doors this week with a new location in Sunnyvale, California. Members will have access to lab and office space, as well as a slew of lab equipment. No need to be a "professional scientist" in order to join.

Microsoft announced that it's working with Sesame Street and other children's television programs to build interactive programming that utilizes the Kinect and XBox360. The future of television? Another big step for gesture-based learning?

A new online degree program will launch in January at the Sage Colleges in Albany, New York. What makes the Achieve Degree unique is that it's the first-of-its-kind program aimed at helping those with developmental disabilities obtain their bachelor's degrees. The degree requires the traditional 120 credit hours, but features small classes, extra supports, accommodation for different learning styles, and a modified course schedule to meet the students' needs.

Purdue University launched a new app for its students this week. Jetpack will allow them to download their course materials -- handouts, readings, videos, links, audio -- directly to their phones. Once downloaded, students will be able to access the "packs," even when they're offline. There's an iOS app available via iTunes (link), and the school says it has plans to open up the platform to others to create their own packs beginning next summer.

The presentation software SlideRocket announced SlideRocket EDU this week, making its tools available to students and teachers via the Google Apps Marketplace.

The online study tool StudyBlue has launched a new Facebook app called "Friends with Brainefits." The app lets student pick a particular topic -- from the ACT to AP tests -- and posts key terms to the student's Facebook wall for friends to comment on. The idea is these comments will help the student remember what the term means. (Hopefully, that's what students remember and not the rude or snarky comments that friends may leave as pseudo-definitions!)

Updates and Upgrades

Google announced a change to the way it will sell its new Chromebooks. Rather than solely offering these Chrome-OS netbooks via subscription, schools will now be able to buy them up front, a move that Google says will work better with schools' annual budget cycles. The new costs: $449 for the WiFi version and $519 for the 3G version. Then, during years 2 and 3 of the contract, schools will pay $5 per month per Chromebook for support.

Learning management system giant Blackboard announced this week that it plans to add a "share" button to its site, so that professors will be able to make their course materials available beyond the walled garden of the LMS. The company is also lifting some of its "per-seat" licensing fees so that those not enrolled in classes aren't charged for accessing the material. I've already reached the limitations of the number of times I can use an image of Admiral Akhbar in an LMS-related story, but you can read more of my thoughts about the announcement here.

Khan Academy announced this week that it has added the first new faculty members beyond just Sal Khan himself. In order to start expanding Khan Academy's offerings into the humanities, the organization will be working with Smarthistory, whose openly-licensed, multimedia art history "textbook" was a recent successful Kickstarter project. Khan told the attendees at Web 2.0 this week that the number of unique visitors to the webiste is up over 300% from last year, up to about 3.5 million per month.

Google unveiled a much-needed facelift for Google Presentations, its would-be PowerPoint substitute. It comes a lot closer to being just that now, with the addition of animations and transitions, as well as better collaborative features.

Professional social networking site LinkedIn added a new feature this week, LinkedIn Classmates. The tool isn't just meant to help connect you with those who graduated from your alma mater, but also tries to offer insights about the career trajectories and trends among graduates.

Classes, Conferences, and Competitions

EDUCAUSE, the non-profit organization that focuses on higher education and IT, is holding its annual conference in Philadelphia this week.

Startup Weekend EDU had its first official event as part of the newly launched education vertical. Held in San Francisco, the winner of the 54-hour-long, "build an ed-tech startup in a weekend" event was Alumn.us, an alumni network for public high schools and community colleges. Startup Weekend EDU is off to Washington DC next, adamant about its mission to help launch thousands of education startups.

Florida Virtual School, an online middle and high school, has added several new courses to its offerings. These include Guitar 1, AP Art History, AP Human Geography, French 1, Sociology, Journalism and Advanced Algebra. Free to Florida public school students, the school also has a for-profit arm, selling these online classes to students outside the state.

Google is holding its second annual Google Code-in competition. Like last year's contest, Google Code-in offers 13 to 17 year olds the chance to work on open source software projects. The contest starts November 21, and you can find out more details about participating here.

The Panel Picker is available for this year's SXSWedu conference. It's your chance to vote on the panels you'd like to see at the event. SXSWedu is also adding a new program this year, LAUNCHedu, where ed-tech startups will have a chance to pitch in front of educators (and a panel of judges).

Microsoft is kicking off its tenth annual Imagine Cup competition this year. The Imagine Cup is a competition that asks college students to work on technology solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems (poverty, disease, environmental destruction, and so on). Registration for the contest opened this week, as did the application process for its new Imagine Cup Grant Program.

Disasters

Sesame Street had its YouTube channel hacked this week. And badly. All the videos were pulled from the channel and replaced with pornography. No one has claimed responsibility for the hack, not surprisingly, because it's hardly a brag-worthy deed.

Donations

The estate of Roald Dahl has donated four of Dahl's most beloved books -- Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- to Worldreader, which means they'll be available as part of the e-reader literacy program in sub-Saharan Africa. The non-profit organization has a collection of more than 56,000 books which it's delivered on Kindles, to some 600 students in Ghana and Kenya.

Research and Data

The American Academy of Pediatrics has long suggested that parents limit the amount of television their young children watch. And this week, the AAP released a new report, this time with more data, to back up those recommendations. Ars Technica has a good write-up of the research.

A newly released report from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce looks at the future of STEM-related jobs. Among the findings, 65% of those with Bachelors Degrees in STEM areas earn more than those with degrees in non-STEM areas (and oftentimes more than those with PhDs in non-STEM areas. It also found that STEM jobs will be 5% of all jobs by 2018, although demand for the skills is growing rapidly outside those occupations seen as traditionally STEM-related. (See PDF for more details.)

Recently, I wrote a story for MindShift, asking whether or not cursive should remain a part of the curriculum. Those looking for a good reason why it should can take solace in the research of Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis van Ahn. Van Ahn is the inventor of the term CAPTCHA, the process by which online forms attempt to verify that the person filling them out is human, not machine. Algorithms are actually getting better at cracking CAPTCHAs. But van Ahn's latest research, reports The Economist, suggests that the ability to read cursive writing and decipher frilly lettering, remains beyond the reach of computers. So apparently reading and writing cursive is something that makes us human.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 summit this week, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor revealed that, contrary to what many people say, most people have actually changed their privacy settings on the site. He specifically noted that younger, more active users were the most savvy about limiting who could view their profiles and posts.

The Freakonomics podcast takes a look at the recent spate of teacher-cheating scandals. Definitely worth a listen.

Financials

Test prep and social learning platform Grockit announced that it has raised $7 million in its latest round of funding. The company also said that it's struck a deal with Georgetown University to make its services available to students and alumni. And Grockit also launched Grockit Answers, an incredibly cool new tool that lets you turn YouTube and Vimeo videos into real-time (or at least, time-coded with the video) Q&A discussions.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that an investment firm run by Jonathan Grayer, the former CEO of Kaplan, has acquired Learning House, a company that helps colleges develop online degree programs.

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has acquired the children's app making company Inquisitive Minds, reports The Next Web, for $13 million. Inquisitive Minds is responsible for Zoodles, a series of products and services to keep kids safe online.

The Apollo Group, the parent organization of the University of Phoenix, released its quarterly earnings results this week. Revenue for the company's fourth quarter totalled $1122 million, a 10.9% decreases from the fourth quarter of 2010. That's due in part to a decrease in enrollment at the University of Phoenix, which is down almost 20% compared to the same time last year.

Ed Tech News, a New Podcast, and the Hack Education Roundup!

2011-10-17T06:20:00.000-07:00

This new weekly blog post / email is replacing the regular email I have sent out for the last couple of years for the now-defunct Host-Your-Own-Webinar program (I still have hopes of resurrecting that near-to-my-heart program, and when that happens we'll wrap it into this weekly missive). There is lots of fun below, and especially don't miss the first weekly recorded podcast with Audrey Watters!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference is almost here! November 2 - 4, all online, all free. The conference schedule is now online, with all 160+ sessions, and an individual hour-by-hour schedule calendar for all 36 time zones. No matter where you are in the world you can see the schedule in your own time (OK, to say I'm a little proud of this achievement is something of an understatement, especially given the MANY daylight savings shifts between now and the conference!). We have attendees signed up from 133 countries! Huge thanks to the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science, the founding sponsor of the conference.
The 2011 Global Education Conference is also fast approaching: November 14 - 18. In it's second year, this amazing five-day, 24-hour-a-day event helps educators and students connect with each other and with global education programs all over the world. The call for presentations has been extended until October 31, and the event is highly inclusive so that we have real global participation. Last year we had presentations from 62 countries.

EVENTS

This Thursday, as part of the Future of Education interview series, my guest will be Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. We'll be talking about Mozilla's Open Badges project, the issues around recognizing skills and achievements that happen outside of traditional learning institutions, and the HASTAC Badges Competition: Badges For Lifelong Learning. Details and log-in links here.
The Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show is still on short hiatus as our amazing hosts recover from some medical issues. Send your best wishes to Peggy, Lorna, and Kim!
The recordings of recent FutureofEducation.com shows are posted: David Loertscher on Library 2.0, Gina Bianchini on Mightybell, Tim Wilson on Redirect, Peter Cookson on a Children's Education Bill of Rights, and an iPads in the Classroom report.

THE NEW WEEKLY ED TECH PODCAST WITH AUDREY WATTERS

Blogger Audrey Watters, whose Hack Education posts and her weekly roundup have become some of my favorite reading, is going to be sitting down with me (virtually) each week to discuss the ed tech news of the week and drill down on stories that have caught her eye (and attracted her writing talent). Audrey is a writer for the NPR education technology blog MindShift, for the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and for the Edutopia blog.

We've actually recorded our first podcast, and if you have half as much fun listening to it as we did recording it, it will be a huge success! Because I'm in a world of hurt with Feedburner and Delicious this week, I can't promise how soon this how will be in my podcast feed, but here's a direct link: http://audio.edtechlive.com/cr20/2011-10-14.mp3. Do listen! Audrey is incredibly knowledgeable, and I think you're going to find listening to her will become a priority each week.
UPDATE: Here's a podcast feed link - http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation

HACK EDUCATION POSTS LAST WEEK

To give you a head start in following along with the podcast, here are Audrey's Hack Education posts from last week:

HACK EDUCATION NEWS ROUNDUP

And here, in full, is the Hack Education weekly roundup, also available directly at Hack Education.

Politics and Policies

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Connect to Compete, a new non-profit initiative that brings private industry and the non-profit sector together to help expand broadband adoption and promote digital literacy. The initiative aims to help boost education, health and employment in disadvantaged communities in the U.S. and aims to address some of the obstacles to broadband adoption -- in terms of cost, access, relevance, and digital literacy.

California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed SB547, a piece of legislation that would have changed the way in which the state handled school accountability. Although the bill would have shifted emphasis away from standardized testing, Brown blasted the reform: “SB547 nowhere mentions good character or love of learning. It does allude to student excitement and creativity, but does not take these qualities seriously because they can’t be placed in a data stream. Lost in the bill’s turgid mandates is any recognition that quality is fundamentally different from quantity.”

Governor Brown signed into legislation the California "Dream Act," allowing illegal immigrants who graduated from high school in the state to apply to its public universities as residents and to receive state financial aid for college.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, the head of the Senate's education committee, submitted a bill this week to revise No Child Left Behind. Among the bill's provisions is the return of control to the states over devising their own systems for how to hold schools accountable for student achievement. The bill will be a massive revisions to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ETAN has already issued an alert that the proposed legislation does not contain language about the "Achievement Through Technology and Innovation Act."

Inside Higher Ed reports that the University of California lecturers' union has stated that it will use its collective bargaining power to block the university system's expansion of online course offerings unless the "move to distance education is done in a fair and just way for our members."

Ethics and Legalities
The New York Times continues its investigation of education giant Pearson and ethics concerns surrounding lavish trips that the company's foundation has sponsored for state education officials.

Last year, the National Federation of the Blind filed a complaint against Penn State, charging that the school's adoption of Google Apps for Education was discriminatory. Google has worked to address many of the accessibility issues, and The Chronicle of HIgher Education reports that the issue was resolved "without any admission of wrongdoing."
Launches
Rated JPG reports that beloved toy-maker LEGO is building its own social network. Called CUUSOO, the site allows users to publish and share their designs. And while the site -- which is currently in beta -- lets users follow interesting designers, there's also a Kickstarter element here. If users receive enough interest in their designs, they can earn a small commission on sales of the design.

Responding to President Obama's call to train 100,000 teachers in STEM subjects in the next 10 years, Google and 80 other organizations have founded 100Kin10. Its mission: "to reverse the United States’ decades-long decline in STEM subjects, to ensure that all children have the basic STEM literacy to be full participants in our economy and democracy and to enable U.S. students to address the most pressing national and global challenges."

Valve, the company behind the video game hit Portal, is working on an educational game. If you haven't played Portal, you might shrug this off as yet another video game company trying to capitalize on the gaming-in-education craze. If you've played Portal (and you should try it, I promise), you're likely to nod with approval, recognizing the game's potential to teach about physics and critical thinking. For more information on the initiative, visit Learnwithportals.com.

The Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons have launched a new website, LMRI.net to provide information about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. It's an effort to create a common language for metadata for educational content, which in turn should ease both its publishing and the discovery.

Pearson announced this week that it plans to release a free learning management system aimed at the higher education market. Although the education giant currently only holds about 1% of the LMS market at the higher ed level, it clearly hopes that offering a free service will help woo schools away from some of the incumbent players in the space.
Updates and Upgrades
Apple released its latest iOS this week. iOS 5 contains a number of new features, including better notifications, wireless syncing, and Twitter integration. But the release caused quite a few hiccups: Web traffic made the upgrade difficult for a lot of customers. And apps like Kno and Stanzafailed to work. While Kno has fixed its issues, it appears as though Stanza, a popular e-reader app, will remain in the app graveyard.

In order to help address some of the frustrations teachers and students face with school filters blocking YouTube, Google has launched a pilot program that will allow schools to redirect all educational content to YouTube.com/education. The program will also block all YouTube comments and make sure that any videos that show up as "related" are also educational.

Google also launched YouTube Space Lab this week, a special channel that, in cooperation with Lenovo, Space Adventures, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will provide space-related video content as well as provide an opportunity for students to design experiments to be conducted in space.

Yale University announced this week that its alumni would gain free access to JSTOR, an online archive of scholarly journals.

The International Digital Publishing Forum announced the approval of the revisions to the EPUB standard. Based on HTML5, EPUB 3 adds support for audio, video and interactivity (via JavaScript), as well as global language support, typing and layout enhancements and MathML, among other features.

Online gradebook LearnBoost added another new feature this week: lesson plan share. As the name suggests, this will allow teachers to share lesson plans with fellow teachers, administrators and students. Lesson plans can be shared via LearnBoost, but also via Twitter or Facebook and can be embedded on websites and/or blogs.
Research and Data
Rey Junco continues to publish interesting research on how Facebook is impacting students' academic performance. Among his latest findings: "Time spent on Facebook was negatively related to overall college GPA. The average time students spent on Facebook was 106 minutes per day. Each increase of 93 minutes beyond the mean decreased GPA by .12 points in the model. Therefore, I conclude that although this was a significant finding, the real-world impact of the relationship between time spent on Facebook and grades is negligible at best."

A study by the NPD Group released this week finds that 91% of kids ages 2 to 17 play games. But this isn't simply kids playing hopscotch or tag, of course. This includes video games, mobile games and the like. According to the report, 38% of kids in this age range are playing mobile games, up from 8% in 2009. And the biggest growth among gamers was in the 2 to 5 age range.

E-book provider Overdrive reports that e-book checkouts from libraries are up over 200% from last year.

Adam Duran, a participant in a two-month long summer program at the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center in Stanford, has developed a touchscreen Braille writer for tablets. Not a reader. A wirter. As the Stanford News describes it, the tool works like such: "They did not create virtual keys that the fingertips must find; they made keys that find the fingertips. The user simply touches eight fingertips to the glass, and the keys orient themselves to the fingers. If the user becomes disoriented, a reset is as easy as lifting all eight fingers off the glass and putting them down again.
Contests, Classes and Conferences
The Digital Media and Learning Competition is extending its deadline for Stage 1 of its "Badges for Lifelong Learning" competition. The new deadline is now November 14.

This weekend is another Startup Weekend EDU in San Francisco. Once again, Grockit is hosting the event.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that James Madison University will begin offering credit to online students who complete a 16-week introductory conversational Spanish course. What makes this newsworthy? That class is produced by language learning software maker Rosetta Stone.
Funding, Hiring, and Acquiring
Despite bad news last week about delays to Pottermore, the new online community for Harry Potter fans and the only place where you'll be able to buy Harry Potter e-books, the site scored a coup this week: Charlie Redmayne, the Chief Digital Officer for HarperCollins, announced that he is leaving the company to join Pottermore as CEO.

Lots of funding news this week: Stickery, a mobile gaming app, announced that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Google Ventures and 500Startups. Kiwi Crate, a new subscription service for hands-on kids' activities, announced this week that it has raised $2 million. Online video portal Udemy announced that it has raised $3 million

Adaptive learning company Knewton announced a massive round of fundraising: $33 million. While initially focusing on test prep, Knewton has recently expanded into universities, where its adaptive learning platform is used in some remedial classes, helping tailor coursework for students in math. The company says it plans to expand to the K-12 grades as well and hopes to open up its platform so that educational publishers can take advantage of the platform. Among its investors in this round: Pearson.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Renaissance Learning has rebuffed a takeover offer by Plato Learning, even though that offer is some $41 million higher than the offer it has accepted from the European private-equity firm Permira.

The investment firm NewSchools Venture Fund has released an Ed Tech Map, a "visual representation of ventures currently operating in the education technology market."

Live Interview Thursday October 20th - Mark Surman from Mozilla on Open Badges

2011-10-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Join me Thursday, October 20th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. We'll be talking about Mozilla's Open Badges project, the issues around recognizing skills and achievements that happen outside of traditional learning institutions, and the HASTAC Badges Competition: Badges For Lifelong Learning.

Date: Thursday, October 20th, 2011
UPDATED Time: 6pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern / 1am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-10-20.1615.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/marksurman.mp3.

Mark Surman is in the business of connecting things: people, ideas, everything. A community technology activist for almost 20 years, Mark is currently the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, with a focus on inventing new ways to promote openness and opportunity on the Internet. On the side, Mark convenes conversations about 'open everything' in his home town of Toronto and around the world.

Before joining Mozilla, Mark was an open philanthropy fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa, he invented new ways to apply open source thinking to social innovation. Earlier, he was the founding director of telecentre.org, a $26 million effort to network community technology activists in countries around the world. Mark has also served as president of the Commons Group, Director of Content and Community at Web Networks and senior advisor to the Volunteer @ction Online grants program team. Mark’s first real job was training social activists to make their own documentaries in the early 1990s.

From the Open Badges Website: Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web -- through a shared infrastructure that's free and open to all. The result: helping learners everywhere display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and level up in their life and work. Learn more.

The Digital Media and Learning Competition focuses on building digital badges for lifelong learning. The Competition is designed to encourage individuals and organizations to create digital tools that support, identify, recognize, measure, and account for new skills, competencies, knowledge, and achievements for 21st century learners wherever and whenever learning takes place.

Special Library 2.0 Interview Today with David Loertscher, Plus Other Live Sessions from WLMA

2011-10-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

Join me today, Friday, October 14th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with David Loertscher, who will be coming in live from the Washington Library Media Association (WLMA) 2011 conference to visit with us. We'll be talking about the changing role of Librarians in the networked world, how technology is impacting teaching and learning, and what a Virtual Learning Commons is.

Additionally, check out other free live-streamed sessions from WLMA today and tomorrow at http://www.wlma.org/webinars--including Richard Bryne and Joyce Valenza!

Date: Friday, October 14th, 2011
Time: 1:45pm Pacific / 4:45pm Eastern / 8:45pm GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-10-14.1044.M.1F955EA48F2E094F071C6C70C81A2F.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio is availble at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/loertscher.mp3.

David V. Loertscher has degrees from the University of Utah, the University of Washington and a Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has been a school library media specialist in Nevada and Idaho at both the elementary and secondary school levels. He has taught at Purdue University, The University of Arkansas, The University of Oklahoma, and is presently a professor at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. He served as head of the editorial department at Libraries Unlimited for ten years and is President of Hi Willow Research & Publishing (distributed by LMC Source at www.lmcsource.com). He has been a president of the American Association of School Librarian

Live Interview Thursday October 13th - Gina Bianchini on Mightybell

2011-10-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Join me Thursday, October 13th, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Gina Bianchini, co-founder and former CEO of Ning, and now creator of the new Web-based service Mightybell. Mightybell is based on the idea that "success comes from thinking big, but acting incrementally," and so the platform allows you to create and share an "experience." An experience is an organized series of step-by-step “actions” users can follow--however, in true Gina B. style, participants in a Mightybell experience are not alone and they become a community, able to comment, communicate, and support each other at every step. Now, if you're beginning to see the connection to education (social learning!), you're going to really enjoy this conversation with Gina as we explore Mightybell, her plans for the service, and its possible uses in the education world. If you want to explore Mightybell in advance, you can join over 650 fellow "travelers" in the experience I created called "Teacher 2.0: Using the Web for Your Personal and Professional Growth."

Date: Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-10-13.1657.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/ginab2011.mp3.

From Wikipedia: Gina Bianchini was CEO of Ning, which she co-founded with Marc Andreessen. Since leaving Ning in March 2010, she has been an executive in residence at the Andreesen Horowitz venture firm.

Bianchini re-emerged in September of 2011 as head of a privately-funded Palo Alto start-up called MightyBell, which is offering a social networking app designed for creators of "experiences" to offer step-by-step directions to those who might want to accomplish goals such as running marathons or going on survival expeditions.

Prior to Ning, Bianchini was co-founder and president of Harmonic Communications which was acquired by Dentsu. She has also held positions at CKS Group and Goldman Sachs.

Bianchini holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.B.A from Stanford Business School.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I consulted for Ning in 2007-2008, and visibly represented the product in the education market during that time.

Live Interview Tuesday October 11th - Timothy Wilson on Psychological Change

2011-10-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

Join me Tuesday, October 11th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Timothy D. Wilson on his new book, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change. The book is not only a fascinating look at the inner workings of personal change (often with regard to self-perceptions in an academic environment), but it is also a clarion call to actually test and measure the results of social change programs--programs which often receive significant financial and cultural support while not actually producing the results they promise, and sometimes even making things worse. We'll talk with Professor Wilson about his book, his experiences in education, and what the implications of his work might be as we think about the current education reform movements.

Date: Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-10-11.1654.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/redirect.mp3.

From Wikipedia: "Timothy D. Wilson is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and a researcher of self-knowledge and affective forecasting.

"Wilson has published a trade book, Strangers to Ourselves and co-authored Social Psychology an introductory textbook on social psychology. The textbook has been translated into Italian, Polish, Chinese, German, Russian, and Serbian, and Strangers to Ourselves has been translated into Dutch and Japanese, with Chinese and German editions forthcoming.

"Wilson is best known for his research on self-knowledge, including affective forecasting. Along with Richard Nisbett, Wilson authored one of Psychology's most cited papers 'Telling more than we can know - Verbal reports on mental processes' that demonstrated the difficulty humans have in introspecting on their own mental processes (Psychological Review, 1977, cited 2731 times as of May 22, 2007 according to ISI Web of Knowledge). His longtime collaborator is Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University.

"His research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. In 2001 he received an All-University Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Virginia. In 2009, he was named as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, Deirdre Smith. He has two children, Christopher and Leigh."

Publisher Description: "What if there were a magic pill that could make you happier, turn you into a better parent, solve a number of your teenager's behavior problems, reduce racial prejudice, and close the achievement gap in education? Well, there is no such magic pill-but there is a new scientifically based approach called story editing that can accomplish all of this. It works by redirecting the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us, with subtle prompts, in ways that lead to lasting change. In Redirect, world-renowned psychologist Timothy Wilson shows how story-editing works and how you can use it in your everyday life.

"The other surprising news is that many existing approaches-from the multi-billion dollar self-help industry to programs that discourage drug use and drinking-don't work at all. In fact, some even have the opposite effect. Most programs are not adequately tested, many do not work, and some even do harm. For example, there are programs that have inadvertently made people unhappy, raised the crime rate, increased teen pregnancy, and even hastened people's deaths-in part by failing to redirect people's stories in healthy ways.

"In short, Wilson shows us what works, what doesn't, and why. Fascinating, groundbreaking, and practical, Redirect demonstrates the remarkable power small changes can have on the ways we see ourselves and the world around us, and how we can use this in our everyday lives. In the words of David G. Myers, 'With wit and wisdom, Wilson shows us how to spare ourselves worthless (or worse) interventions, think smarter, and live well.'"

Live Interview Tuesday October 4th - A Children's Education Bill of Rights

2011-10-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

Join me Tuesday, October 4th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Peter W. Cookson, Jr., on his book Sacred Trust: A Children's Education Bill of Rights. Peter will discuss his "proposed education bill of rights for American students, including ideas on how to restructure the United States Department of Education for greater equality and improved academic achievement for all learners."

Date: Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-10-04.1736.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/cookson.mp3.

From Peter's Website: Peter Cookson’s knowledge of schools and children’s learning needs comes from a lifetime of teaching, researching, and working to improve the quality of education for all children. His first job after college was as a case worker for the New York City Department of Social Services. His days were spent visiting the homes of the city’s most disadvantaged citizens. It is to these families, especially the children, that he owes a life’s commitment to the cause of educational justice.

Peter went on to teach social studies at a large rural public school and history and Latin at a private day school. He returned to NYU to receive a Ph.D. in the Sociology of Education and continued on with a post-graduate certificate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an M.A. from the Yale Divinity School.

He has taught and held leadership positions at several leading colleges and universities, including Teachers College, Columbia University, where he currently teaches the Sociology of Urban Education. He also currently works with schools around the country as the founder of a Washington, D.C. based consulting firm, Ideas without Borders.

Throughout his career he has written, lectured, debated, and researched extensively on the democratic importance of equality of educational opportunity, 21st century learning, and educational innovation. Some of his works include Preparing for Power: America’s Elite Boarding Schools, co-authored with Caroline Hodges Persell (1985); School Choice and the Struggle for the Soul of American Education (1994); Expect Miracles: Charter Schools and the Politics of Hope and Despair, co-authored with Kristina Berger (2002); and his latest book, Sacred Trust: A Children’s Education Bill of Rights (2011). He is completing another book to be published in 2012, The Great Unequalizer: Class and American Education.

Peter’s wife, Susan, worked for many years as a family therapist and is now a professional artist. They have two children and four grandchildren.

From the Website: Education sociologist and policy expert Peter Cookson boldly describes an actual education bill of rights for American students that will ensure greater equity and improved academic achievement for all. He presents a national blueprint of action that has been endorsed by major political, economic, and educational leaders.

Cookson explains that “a children’s education bill of rights provides a framework for consensus and constructive action that can build bridges of hope and understanding over the chasms of misunderstanding and mistrust that divide us.”

The book asserts that all children have the fundamental right to:

a neighborhood public school or a public school of choice that is funded for excellence
physical and emotional health and safety
have his or her heritage, background, and religious differences honored, incorporated in study, and celebrated in the culture of the school
develop individual learning styles and strategies to the greatest extent possible
an excellent and dedicated teacher
a school leader with vision and educational expertise
a curriculum based on relevance, depth, and flexibility
have access to the most powerful educational technologies
fair, relevant, and learner-based evaluations
complete high school

Included are examples from a wide range of public and private schools in rural, urban, and suburban areas that illustrate problems and solutions. Through vivid storytelling and relevant research, Cookson provides specific and innovative steps for creating a concrete action plan that will lead to just, equitable, and first-class schools.

The book includes a Foreword by Rudy Crew, Former Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Former Chancellor, New York City Board of Education.

Live Interview Thursday Sept. 29th on "iPads in the Classroom--a Success Story"

2011-09-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

Working in conjunction with the Michigan Department of Education and Emmy Award Winning Director, Allyson Rockwell, the Mason-Lake and Oceana ISDs are working on a documentary film chronicling the success in the pilot kindergarten and second grade iPad classrooms in Ludington, Michigan. The classroom pilots, funded by 21st Century Learning Environments, have had "tremendous success" and are gaining much attention at the state and national levels. The documentary project has already received funding, and those involved have submitted a grant application to expand the ipads to all pre-K-2 students in the three counties. We'll talk with members of the team involved in this project, and give time for Q and A.

Date: Thursday, September 29th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-09-29.1440.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/ipads.mp3.

As State Director of Educational Technology and Data Coordination at the Michigan Department of Education (MDE), Bruce Umpstead is responsible for implementing Michigan's online learning graduation requirement and the State Educational Technology Plan. His major professional points of emphasis are using technology to support research based school improvement and innovation programs, creating incentives for technology adoption, and taking technology-based innovations to scale in education.

Ashley McDonald has been given an amazing opportunity to implement iPads in her kindergarten classroom for the past two school years. Her students have accomplished far more than she ever imagined, as she feels iPads are a great resource to level instruction so that all students needs are being met. She attended Grand Valley State University from 2002 to 2006 with undergrad in Elementary Education, emphasis in Integrated Science. Her first teaching job was a kindergarten position in Phoenix, Arizona. While in Arizona she obtained my Masters degree in Early Childhood Instruction, specializing in reading. This is her 6th year teaching.

Director/Producer Allyson Rockwell, has worked produced/directed numerous corporate, political, industrial and educational videos. She has produced documentary films from the Sub-Arctic of northern Quebec to Leon, Nicaragua on topics ranging from a controversial hydro-power plant and it's effect on the environment to a holocaust survivor who’s inspiration helps to change our world. Recently she won an Emmy award for “Detroit Remember When: The Jewish Community” which documented the history of the Jewish community in the Detroit area and just completed and educational outreach program called “FlipClips” where she worked with teens to create short films about what makes them proud of their community. As a producer for smART TV, Rockwell produced an educational series bringing arts and culture programming to middle school students. She was also a producer for “The Learning Classroom: Theory Into Practice” which is a 13-part video- and Web-based course for teacher education and professional development. It was created through a partnership between the Annenberg Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with the course content and this print guide developed by Stanford University’s School of Education. The project uses media and telecommunications to advance excellent teaching in American schools.

Tom Johnson serves as the Director of Technology for the Mason-Lake and Oceana ISDs, two regional intermediate school districts in Western Michigan. His career in education, both as student and educator, has been non-traditional. Leaving college after three years and entering the private sector, Mr. Johnson was drawn to a 'make a difference' and a career in education. He worked twelve years in K-12 education before completing his bachelors degree in Community Development and Administration. However, this didn't limit his impact as he strove to make education relevant for students and to leverage technology to do so. Earning his Masters in Education, completely online, in under two years his focus narrowed on impacting teaching and learning directly. Having successfully written and managed nearly 100 grants, most in educational technology, over the past eighteen years, his vision for the future of education is one of students engaged and collaborating with learning driven by curiosity and social interaction. As someone who personally longed for relevance and the freedom to learn in his own way and at his own pace, Mr. Johnson is an advocate for and believes in the potential of all students.

Amber Kowatch is a Second Grade Teacher at Franklin Elementary School in Ludington, MI. She is a graduate of Lake Superior State University where she is currently working to complete her master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction. Her first teaching job landed her in Sault Ste. Marie, MI at a well funded charter school that used technology to its’ fullest potential. This has led Amber to do everything possible to use technology in her classroom. As most public schools are faced with difficult budgets, Ludington Area School District is as well. Not having the funding to purchase technology, Amber was approached to lead a pilot program using iPads one to one in her second grade classroom. This project has gained national attention and is currently being used as the basis for a documentary. The iPad pilot has been extremely successful in engaging Amber’s students on their own educational journey and has changed the way her students learn and the way she teaches!

Live Tuesday Sept. 27th with Cecilia d'Oliveira from MIT's OpenCourseWare

2011-09-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

Join me Tuesday, September 27th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Cecilia d’Oliveira, Executive Director, OpenCourseWare (OCW) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Cecilia was the technology director for OCW since 2002, and in 2008 was named executive director. She was also a winner of a 2010 WISE Award.

Date: Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-09-27.1602.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/opencourseware.mp3.

Cecilia d’Oliveira is Executive Director of OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Ms. d'Oliveira leads the team that works with MIT faculty to publish MIT's course materials openly and with organizations around the world who are implementing their own opencourseware programs as institutional initiatives or national education policy. From 2002 to 2008 she served as MIT OpenCourseWare's Technology Director with responsibility for building the technical infrastructure for the program. Over 25 years she has worked in a variety of information technology positions, focused on technology innovation in support of MIT education, research and business initiatives. Ms. d’Oliveira received a Master's degree from M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from MIT.

From the OpenCourseWare Site: In 1999, MIT Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of MIT's mission—to advance knowledge and educate students—and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site.

The Closing of LearnCentral.org

2011-09-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

Today, Blackboard Collaborate has announced the end-of-year closing of the LearnCentral.org social network for educators. I'm posting the full announcement, plus the FAQ, below. As well, a discussion forum has been set up at http://www.learncentral.org/forums/site-announcements/learncentral-sunset-discussion to answer any specific questions and provide transition help.

As you can imagine, this is a tough day for all of us who've been involved with LearnCentral. It is the right decision, but that doesn't mean it won't be hard for those of you who have appreciated or depended on the unique functionalities of the network. Foremost for me, right now, though, is to give each of you a HUGE "thank you" for being on this journey with us. As we all know, not every Web project succeeds, but you helped to explore the exciting combination of what we liked to call the "LC3:" a social network for educators, a personalized repository for collecting and sharing educational resources, and synchronous meeting capability.

An unfortunate casualty of the closure decision is the "host-your-own-webinar" program. You'll notice this takes place immediately, although previously-scheduled events can take place through the end of the year. I'd love for this program to continue in some fashion, so if you know an organization that might like to sponsor it, have them reach out to me directly. Those of you who have followed my work with Elluminate and now Blackboard will know that I went to part-time status after the acquisition, but let me express again my appreciation for having been able to work for a company, and on projects, around a product that I truly believe in and believe will continue to make a huge difference to students and educators around the world.

Here's the official letter from Maurice Heiblum, President of Blackboard Collaborate. The FAQ follows. If I can answer any questions or be of any help, feel free to reach out to me personally at steve.hargadon@blackboard.com.

Subject: LearnCentral Important Announcement
Following the acquisition of Elluminate and Wimba by Blackboard we have been working hard to meet our commitments to our combined user communities including exceptional customer service, a unified team, and a collective product roadmap. In July, we were excited to deliver to you Blackboard Collaborate 11, a product that inherited the best from both the Elluminate and Wimba platforms but which was simpler, easier to use and truly designed by the educators that use it.
Over the past year, we have also looked closely at our community networking project, LearnCentral, and have decided to close LearnCentral on December 31, 2011.
While LearnCentral held much promise as a general social networking platform for educators, we recognize that it never became the preferred destination for educators, and we don't believe that continued development would provide significant benefits that aren't available to educators through other services. In addition, we have learned from our clients that they prefer us to focus on the web conferencing, instant messaging, and voice authoring products which are our core capability.
We are making this announcement at this time to make sure that those of you using LearnCentral have ample time to make plans for using another service, a number of which are listed below and that also offer features similar to LearnCentral. These are free, established social networking projects, and should serve you well.
If you are sharing or delivering instructional content, please take a look at the Blackboard CourseSites platform, where you can create interactive websites to support learning and collaboration. While typically geared toward delivering instruction, it can also be used to share, discuss and develop curriculum and teaching best practices. In addition, CourseSites offers access to a 50-seat Collaborate room.
We know there are likely to be questions about the transition, some of which are answered below. We have also opened up a discussion thread at http://www.learncentral.org/forums/site-announcements/learncentral-sunset-discussion for you to ask about anything that is not covered here.
vRooms: The free, 3-person vRoom program will continue, but with a modified entry point. Your existing vRooms will be available until December 31, 2011. Before that date we will send an email to all LearnCentral users with specific information on how to sign up for a new vRoom through the main Blackboard Collaborate site.
Elluminate or Blackboard Collaborate Recordings: All recordings that you may have added as resource links in LearnCentral will continue to be available, however, the links to access them will change. The recording links on LearnCentral actually point to the native recording files stored elsewhere. If you launch a recording, you’ll notice the true URL in the browser address bar which starts with https://sas.elluminate.com/ - After, 12/31/2011, you will need to access these recordings with the https://sas.elluminate.com/ links, so please ensure you separately save the URLs for those recordings if you have not already done so.
Uploaded Content: All uploaded content in LearnCentral portfolios will be unavailable after December 31st. Please make sure that you download any content in your portfolios that is important to you.
Host-Your-Own-Webinar Program: The host-your-own-webinar program will be discontinued. Any already-scheduled events can be held up until December 31, 2011, but the regular weekly email promotion will stop this week. If you’d like continued access to recordings of past events, please follow the process listed in the “Elluminate Recordings” section above. Again, we recommend looking at CourseSites as a free alternative that may serve as a replacement for users of this program by using the free 50-seat Collaborate room in CourseSites.
We want to thank you for choosing to be a valued member of the LearnCentral public community for educators. We hope you've been able to connect with your colleagues and make new ones, to share and discover valuable relevant resources, and to participate in online discussions and live webinars. We have enjoyed working alongside you for the past three years, and we appreciate all that you have done to support education.
Sincerely,
Maurice Heiblum
President
Blackboard Collaborate

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: When is LearnCentral closing?
A: We are closing LearnCentral on December 31, 2011.

Q: Why is LearnCentral shutting down?
A: We will be focusing our community networking efforts on established and dedicated sites geared towards educators, such as wecollaborate.com, Classroom 2.0, EdWeb, etc. (Fuller list below)

Q: What does this mean for LearnCentral users?
A: Many of the online learning tools available on LearnCentral are now available in CourseSites, our free, fully hosted online course creation and facilitation service that includes the web conferencing features of Blackboard Collaborate and is available to instructors for up to five courses.

Q: What are other services I can use that are similar to LearnCentral?
A: Benefits from an offering like LearnCentral are also available to educators through other services. There are free, established social networking projects that should serve existing LearnCentral users well:

WeCollaborate.com
Classroom 2.0
EdWeb
Teachers.Net
PBS Teachers
BrainPop
We Are Teachers
Edmodo
ePals
An extensive list of Ning and other social networks for educators is listed at http://www.educationalnetworking.com.

Q: Why are you making this announcement now?
A: We want to ensure that people using LearnCentral have ample time to make plans for other resources available to educators.

Q: Who can I contact with questions about LearnCentral?
A: You can access a discussion thread at http://www.learncentral.org/forums/site-announcements/learncentral-sunset-discussion to ask questions. You can also reach out to Steve Hargadon directly.

Program-Specific Questions

Q: What will happen to vRoom?
A: The free, three-person vRoom program will continue, but with a modified entry point through the main Blackboard Collaborate site. We will send an email to all LearnCentral users with specific information on how to sign up for a new vRoom through Blackboard Collaborate.

Q: What will happen to Elluminate or Blackboard Collaborate recordings?
A: All recordings added as resource links in LearnCentral will continue to be available with modified access links. After December 31, 2011, these recordings can be accessed through the https://sas.elluminate.com/ links, so please ensure you separately save the URLs for those recordings if you have not already done so.

Q: What will happen to my uploaded content?
A: All uploaded content in LearnCentral portfolios will be unavailable after December 31, 2011. Please make sure to download any content in your portfolios that is important to you.

Q: What will happen to the host-your-own-webinar program?
A: The host-your-own-webinar program will be discontinued. Any already-scheduled events can be held until December 31, 2011. The regular weekly email promotion will stop the week of September 19, 2011. If you’d like continued access to past program recordings, please follow the process listed in the “Elluminate or Blackboard Collaborate Recordings”.

Anne Mirtschin, Hero

2011-09-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

Rural-school accounting teacher and global collaborator extraordinaire, Anne Mirtschin, has created this presentation on web-conferencing for learning. She is amazing.

Web Conferencing for Learning (using Blackboard Collaborate)

View more presentations from murcha

A (Now) Open Letter to Marc Andreessen About Venture-Funded Ed Tech Start-Ups

2011-09-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

I wrote this letter last week to Marc Andreessen after seeing him quoted (originally in the WSJ) as actively backing aggressive start-up firms, with plans to disrupt health care and education "by great new software-centric entrepreneurs." I'm going to call a little hubris here, but I want to be clear that in my view Marc's not alone--it's just that I happen to have corresponded with him before so I had somewhere to vent. I haven't heard back from Marc, and really don't expect to, but seems that every day that I'm reading about some millions being funded to an ed tech software start-up, or some gathering on education technology solutions that doesn't seem to actually involve educators at all.

Really?

So to all of you excitedly starting ed tech ventures with visions of making things better: do you folks honestly think you're so smart that you don't need to spend some time actually doing some serious learning about the problems you're thinking you're going to solve? Have you even gone to one of the long-standing educational technology events and talked (or more importantly, listened) to devoted educators who have been thinking about these things for years, if not decades? Do you know what Seymour Papert thought? What about John Dewey? Or John Taylor Gatto, or Ted Sizer? For heaven's sake, Gary Stager? Do you know what progressivism, constructivism, or connectivism are (I'm not even sure I do, and I've been working on this for a few years now). You're right next door to Stanford, so have you read or listened or talked to Larry Cuban, or Linda Darling-Hammond, Carol Dweck, or Denise Pope? Maybe I'm not giving you (the universal VC ed tech group you) enough credit, but I'm guessing that the answer is no.

If it is no, then, c'mon. Seriously. If education is so broken that you're going to make it better by being completely different, then can you define your philosophy of education? If it's not so seriously broken, and you're just going to solve some small problems, then are you sure that your solutions are actually making things better? A case in point: if you are creating a better system for tracking student data and outputs that increases the efficiency of viewing students as raw material that a system fabricates into something it wants, is that the right thing to do? Many of you come from an Open Source background--does this actually harmonize with your personal feelings about what education should be?

My letter:

Marc:

I don't know if I'll get to you with this email address, but worth a try.

I just read some of your comments about edtech in the Betsy Corchoran's EdSurge newsletter. I'd suggest some caution.

My FutureofEducation.com interview series started with my passionate interest in the role of technology in changing education. What I've come to see over the last three years is that education is a highly personal activity, and the evolution of the interview series might be valuable to you--as the discussions have moved significantly toward pedagogy and away from technology.

I've been intrigued by the VC interest in education because:

1. There's seems to be little discussion of the historically deep pedagogical and philosophical threads around learning. "Silver bullet" solutions to education should throw up some huge red flags. There's a human/cognitive tendency to believe we have solutions when we only have a surface-level understanding of problems, and that seems to be going on in spades right now.

2. As with humanitarian work, those with the money often bring the wrong set of measurements to the task, and their animated conversations about doing good are often completely divorced from the actual individuals and issues involved.

3. There's an extensive and rich movement related to education and technology that's been taking place through social media (including on many Ning networks) with passionate, devoted, and experienced educators working together in really amazing ways to reshape education. This is the peer-to-peer kind of dramatic movement that has kinship with the democracy movements in the Middle East. Were someone really interested in helping to reshape education, I'd suggest starting to look at what's going on there and trying to figure out how to support and encourage it. I haven't seen any movement by the VC crowd to actually involve these folks in what they are doing, and that should be worrisome.

For what it's worth.

Steve

SXSWEDU Collaboration Ideas

2011-09-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Jennifer Openshaw and Karen Fasimpaur I'm thinking about SXSWEDU (http://www.sxswedu.com/). Anyone want to work together on any of the following ideas?

School 2.0: Teachers as the Critical Groundswell for the Future of Education
Open Source Software in Education: Why It's Been a Non-Starter
Hack Your Education: If and When Students Should Be Calling the Shots
Technology, Pedagogy, and the Lure of the Silver Bullet: The Fatal Blindness of Ed Tech VC
Learning 2.0: The Impact of Cognitive Science on Education

Proposals are due October 1, so email me or comment here posthaste! :)

Live Tuesday Sept. 20th with Filmmaker Bob Gliner on "Lessons from the Real World"

2011-09-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

Join me Tuesday, September 20th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with award-winning documentary producer Bob Gliner about his education movie, Lessons from the Real World: "Learning to read, do math and other subjects happens when students care about what they are learning, rather than drilling them with subject matter largely divorced from their real lives. This engaging documentary provides a first hand look at K-12 schools and classes that weave community and societal problem solving through their curriculum as a way of both preparing students for active participation in democratic society, as well as motivating them to learn basic skills as part of a meaningful educational experience."

Date: Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-09-20.1642.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/bobgliner.mp3. The LearnCentral event page is http://www.learncentral.org/node/172591.

Bob Gliner is an award winning documentary producer with more than 30 programs to his credit. His programs have appeared on PBS stations throughout the United States and have also been shown to classes in a wide variety of university and public school settings, as well as by nonprofit organizations. His primary focus is social problems and social change - both inside the United States and throughout the world. He has shot programs in such disparate locales as Russia, Macedonia, Viet Nam, India, Tanzania, Israel, Ecuador, and Cuba. He is competent in all aspects of the production process from initial stages of researching and organizing the production to script writing, interviewing, camera and editing. He is also a professor of sociology at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.

Lessons from the Real World: "Many people feel our public schools are failing, or at best, muddling through. What to do about this critical issue has almost exclusively focused on the efforts of No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top legislation to improve test scores in core subjects like math and reading.

"The future of our nation and our ability to compete in the economic marketplace with other countries is considered to hinge on these high stakes tests, with teachers, schools and entire school districts held accountable for failure. The results, afforded much media coverage, have been mixed though the process has produced many students turned off to formal education. An equally important consequence is that the increased narrowing of the curriculum to try to achieve these limited objectives, has undermined the ability of students to become active, informed and engaged citizens in a democratic society – capable of doing something about the issues which dramatically impact their lives.

"Lessons From the Real World, contends, like many educators, that focusing on test scores to improve student achievement is looking in the wrong place.

"Learning to read, do math and other subjects will come if students care about what they are learning, rather than drilling them with subject matter largely divorced from their real lives, and the community and societal problems which often impact those lives.

"In Portland, Oregon, teachers at a wide range of schools are putting this idea into practice. While this is their story, it can help point the way to rethinking how schools everywhere can be successfully transformed.

"Lessons From the Real World, a highly informative and entertaining documentary, filled with engaging teachers, students and lessons will surely bring much needed attention to a long neglected and critical aspect of the debate around public education.

"Since its release in April 2011, Lesson From The Real World has aired on many PBS stations across the country. It was also screened at the SOS (Save Our Schools) Conference in Washington D.C. in July 2011 and at the AERO Conference in Portland, Oregon in August."

Library 2.011 Conference Presentation Proposal Deadline Extended to September 25

2011-09-15T20:47:00.000-07:00

This note is for those of you who have been following the inaugural Library 2.011 Worldwide Conference. As you know, September 15 was the deadline for submitting presentation proposals, but the number of conference site signups over the past four days has been incredible--clearly, many people are just now learning about the conference. Therefore, we’ve decided to extend the deadline for submitting a short abstract of your presentation. Speaking proposals are now due by Sunday, September 25. To view the six thought-provoking topic strands, visit: http://www.library20.com/page/strands-proposals.

If you already submitted your presentation proposal, we thank you for your timeliness. To show our appreciation, we will give you the choice of time slots for presenting. Proposals are currently being reviewed, and once accepted, we’ll send you an early link to the scheduling page. Then simply choose an available time slot and date, and we’ll see you online (there will be lots of training sessions in October to help you learn to use Blackboard Collaborate).

In addition to the new deadline of Sunday, September 25 for submitting proposals, here is an updated set of important dates to note:

September 30: Acceptance notification of presentations that were submitted by the original deadline of September 15 will be emailed.
October 1: Presentations submitted by the original deadline of September 15 will be allowed to start scheduling presentation times.
October 6: Presentations submitted by the extended deadline of September 25 will be allowed to start scheduling presentation times.
November 2: The conference begins!

If you haven’t already done so, take a moment to look through the set of presentation proposals that have been submitted to date: http://www.library20.com/forum/categories/library-2011-conference/listForCategory.

We are also very thankful for the support of our sponsor and partner organizations and everyone who has helped to spread the word about the conference.

As a reminder, this exciting event will be held online in multiple languages and time zones, and it’s free to attend! We’ll see you online November 2-3!

Teacher 2.0 - Join My Self-Paced, Online, and Free Workshop

2011-09-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

About the same time that we started organizing the super-fun Teacher 2.0 workshop in Melbourne, I got a call from Peter Slutsky. Peter previously worked at Ning and is now teamed up again with Gina Bianchini (one of the co-founders of Ning) on new project she's started called Mightybell.

The history is that Gina hired me as a consultant in the early days of Classroom 2.0 to help evangelize her then-free Ning platform to the education audience. I'd gotten to know Gina by interviewing her for my education series, and I just called her and told her she needed to hire me. To her great credit (and my continued appreciation), she did hire me. The work I did for Ning for 18 months became a model for me of what I consider to be a privileged role I've had for the last five years: that of trying to authentically make a difference for educators while working for commercial companies that also allowed me to keep shepherding my free social projects.

Peter and Gina were now reaching out to see if I'd consider being a launch partner (uncompensated) at Mightybell by creating an educational "experience." While I wasn't sure I fully understood the concept, it seemed like it might be a good fit with the upcoming workshop and my Teacher 2.0 network, both of which based on helping educators to use the Web for their own personal and professional development.

Basically, Mightybell is a way to create a step-by-step "experience" for others where they share that experience with fellow "travelers" through commenting and dialog. It didn't take me long, once I took the outline from our Melbourne workshop and starting creating the steps for a Teacher 2.0 Mightybell experience, to begin to see the magic of an incremental and socially-based learning experience. While I have lots of suggestions for Mightybell around filtering or organizing that community experience for specific "groups" that might want to go through an experience together (Peter is getting several emails a day from me!), I have to say that I think this is a brilliant concept.

So I encourage you to come and join me at my "Steve Hargadon's Teacher 2.0: Using the Web for Your Personal and Professional Growth." It's free and hopefully it's both fun and helpful! Please let me know what you think.

Announcing the 2011 Global Education Conference!

2011-09-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

Because I was traveling, my co-chair for the 2011 Global Education Conference, Lucy Gray, took the lead on announcing our new conference website, dates, and call for proposal. But while I might be a week (or two!) late to the party, I promise I'm just as excited!

Part of my excitement is that we are organizing the conference in a Ning network. This has some tremendous advantages, including ease of communication, but also a proposal system that allows you to connect with potential presenters in advance on ideas you care about, and to comment on specific proposals. This particular brainstorm came about as part of the Library 2.011 Conference I'm running out of the Library 2.0 Ning network, so let me know what you think--I'm kind of stunned by the implications of an open proposal and networking process.

But on to the actual announcement!

The second annual Global Education Conference, a week-long event bringing together educators and innovators from around the world, will be held Monday, November 14 through Friday, November 18, 2011. The entire conference will be broadcast online for free using the Blackboard Collaborate platform (formerly known as Elluminate/Wimba).

The Global Education Conference is a collaborative and world-wide community effort organized by the Global Education Collaborative, Classroom 2.0, and Web 2.0 Labs, and is aimed at increasing opportunities for globally-connecting education activities and initiatives. Last year’s conference featured 387 sessions and 60 keynote addresses from 62 countries with over 15,000 participant logins. Sessions will be held in multiple time zones and multiple languages over the five days, and all of last years sessions are currently archived as a standing educational resource at http://globaledcon.weebly.com/recordings.html.

The Call for Proposals for the 2011 event is now open at http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/call-for-proposals. Presenters can submit proposals for general sessions focused on one of four possible tracks: Teacher Track; Student Track; Curricular Track; and Policy and Leadership Track. Proposals should focus on ideas, projects, and initiatives that promote global understanding and collaboration. The deadline for submissions is October 15 and participants will be notified of acceptance by October 30. Keynote presentations are by invitation only.

Session proposals are to be non-commercial. Interest in commercial sponsorship or presentations should be directed to me at steve@hargadon.com.

As we did last year, we encourage non-commercial organizations to become conference partners (we had over 90 partner organizations last year!). Conference partners will be given a spotlight session this year. More information at http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/conference-partners.

We'll also be hoping for another incredible outpouring of volunteer support like we had last year (those of you who helped were AMAZING!). If you'd like to help promote awareness of the conference by serving on our International Advisory Board go to http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/intl-advisory-board, or if you are willing to volunteer to help moderate sessions (making you an absolute rockstar!) go to http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/volunteers-1.

For further information, please join our network at http://globaleducationconference.com and follow conference announcements on Twitter (@GlobalEdCon) and the hashtag #GlobalEd11.

Library 2.011 Conference Proposals Due Thursday September 15th!

2011-09-12T13:24:00.001-07:00

Almost 2,500 people have signed up from 133 countries to participate in the Library 2.011 worldwide conference. The conference is free, being held virtually, and should be a GREAT event. You can sign up any time at http://www.library2011.com. Three quick notes:

1. Presentation proposals are due this Thursday, September 15th. Library 2.011 presents a unique opportunity to showcase the excellent research and work related to libraries and librarians. If you would like to present, please take a few minutes of your time to submit your talk proposal. It just requires an abstract--your entire presentation doesn’t need to be completed. For instructions on how to submit your proposal, visit: http://www.library20.com/page/call-for-proposals. To view examples of presentation topics for each subject strand, click here: http://www.library20.com/forum/categories/library-2011-conference/listForCategory.

2. We have a terrific list of partner organizations who've joined us (including ALA, SLA, ALISE, ASIST, and the Ontario Library Association). Whether you are a small school library or a multi-national organization, we want to encourage you to become a conference partner. There are no financial obligations for being a partner organization--all we ask is that you actively promote the conference to your membership and network, and encourage participation as well as presentations and submissions. More information at http://www.library20.com/page/conference-partners.

3. Once you've signed up at the conference website, you can let us know if you want to volunteer or to serve on the International Advisory Board. Links to do so are on the site!

Week of September 12, 2011 - Live and Interactive Webinars in Blackboard Collaborate

2011-09-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

Below are this week's public, free, and interactive Webinars through LearnCentral.org, the social learning network for education that I work on for Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate).

The time of the events below will show up automatically in your own time zone when you are registered in LearnCentral and when you have chosen your time zone in your profile, or you can check the new event time converter on the event page. Event recordings are posted and available after the events if you aren't able to attend them live. If you are looking for an easy calendar import / RSS feed for these events, you'll now find a link on your calendar page or the calendar page of specific groups!

We hope you will consider hosting your own public webinars using the free LearnCentral public room--instructions are available by joining the "Host Your Own Webinar" group on the main announcement tab (http://www.learncentral.org/group/3432/host-your-own-webinars).

Thanks for your attention, and see you online!

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL (TL Cafe)
Mon 12 Sep 08:00PM New York / Tue 13 Sep 12:00AM GMT / Tue 13 Sep 10:00AM Sydney
Gwyneth Jones. Back to School Special: Best Year Ever!
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169124

EPCOP MOOC WEBINAR (Australia Series)
Mon 12 Sep 09:00PM New York / Tue 13 Sep 01:00AM GMT / Tue 13 Sep 11:00AM Sydney
Coach Carole.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/167794

"MINI-GEEK FEST" MONTHLY ONLINE CONVERSATION SEPTEMBER, 2011 (AzTEA 2.0 Professional Development)
Mon 12 Sep 09:00PM New York / Tue 13 Sep 01:00AM GMT / Tue 13 Sep 11:00AM Sydney
Peggy George. Fun, open, sharing session of web 2.0 tools and teaching resources. Join us and come prepared to share your favorites. Do you get excited and energized by talking with other educators about technology tools and resources? Do you often feel overwhelmed with all of the new tools and feel you don’t have time to keep up with everything? If you do, then the Mini-Geek Fest is here for you! No homework, no assignments, no cost—just an hour online, once a month to listen, share and discuss technology tools for your classroom, websites and more. Join co-hosts Kim Thomas and Peggy George in AzTEA Elluminate from the comfort of your own home. Professional Development credit (1 hour) will be available. The show will be on the second Monday of each month, 6-7PM (MST-AZ). It's not a presentation or a tutorial, but a conversation--think of it like a "show and tell" where ALL participants can contribute. Shows will be recorded and archived so you can listen to the recordings later if you can't participate in the live sessions. We look forward to an exciting and interesting conversation!
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168992

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP 2.0? (Australia Series)
Tue 12 Sep 02:00AM New York / Tue 13 Sep 06:00AM GMT / Tue 13 Sep 04:00PM Sydney
Anne Mirtschin. This is an unconference Tech Talk Tuesdays session,where participants can share what they have been up to in learning and teaching. Bring your favourite technological tools, newest experiments, ideas, resources, problems, issues and open them up for discussion.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/171833

TALLER MEMORIAS EN RED - #DDHHYC (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Tue 13 Sep 11:30AM New York / Tue 13 Sep 03:30PM GMT / Wed 14 Sep 01:30AM Sydney
Luz Pearson. 4to encuentro de la comunidad de aprendizaje del curso Memorias en red
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169727

HOWARD GARDNER ON COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND SCHOOL REFORM (Future of Education Series)
Tue 13 Sep 08:00PM New York / Wed 14 Sep 12:00AM GMT / Wed 14 Sep 10:00AM Sydney
Steve Hargadon. Join Steve Hargadon on Tuesday, September 13th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Harvard professor and well-known author Howard Gardner. In particular, we are going to talk about the new edition of his 1991 book, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, looking at school reform from the perspective of cognitive science.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/171686

The 2011 Worldwide Virtual Library Conference
November 2 - 3, All Free, All Online in Blackboard Collaborate
Submit to present or to be kept informed at http://www.Library2011.com

The 2011 Global Education Conference
November 14 - 18, All Free, All Online in Blackboard Collaborate
Submit to present or to be kept informed at http://www.GlobalEdCon.com

GETTING TEENS & TWEENS TO READ W/ANITA BEAMAN (ISLMA) (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Wed 14 Sep 07:30PM New York / Wed 14 Sep 11:30PM GMT / Thu 15 Sep 09:30AM Sydney
Lisa Perez. Attend this session with Anita Beaman to learn how to get teens and tweens excited about reading. This event is hosted by the Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA).
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168240

APRENDIZAJE EN RED CON USO DE TIC (ARTIC) - SESIÓN 5 (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Thu 15 Sep 07:00PM New York / Thu 15 Sep 11:00PM GMT / Fri 16 Sep 09:00AM Sydney
Diego Leal. Quinta sesión del curso abierto ArTIC (http://artic.pbworks.com)
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170230

SAM CHALTAIN ON "FACES OF LEARNING" (Future of Education Series)
Thu 15 Sep 08:00PM New York / Fri 16 Sep 12:00AM GMT / Fri 16 Sep 10:00AM Sydney
Steve Hargadon. Join Steve Hargadon on Thursday, September 15th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar Sam Chaltain, DC-based writer and education activist, on his new book Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education. Sam was a guest last year on FutureofEducation.com to talk about his previous book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community, and we'll continue our conversation on education using his collection of the personal learning stories of fifty individuals–from well-known public figures to ordinary Americans–who share "inspirational stories about transformational teachers, powerful learning environments, and pivotal moments of self-discovery."
http://www.learncentral.org/node/171713

CLASSROOM 2.0 LIVE-LIZZIE CHASE (AU) (Classroom 2.0 LIVE)
Sat 17 Sep 12:00PM New York / Sat 17 Sep 04:00PM GMT / Sun 18 Sep 02:00AM Sydney
Peggy George. Lizzie Chase, Australian educator, will share a series of free downloadable English lessons at http://otherworlds.yolasite.com for upper primary and lower secondary students, integrating Web 2.0 tools into student responses to 12 books, so that they can create multimedia texts. There is a focus on research skills, digital storytelling and visual arts tools.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/171720

O-MUN DEBATE (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Sun 18 Sep 08:30AM New York / Sun 18 Sep 12:30PM GMT / Sun 18 Sep 10:30PM Sydney
Luc Noordholland de Jong. Students will simulate the United Nations and debate the issue of cyber warfare. Please register via http://o-mun.org/register and learn more about our program at http://o-mun.org/about. To learn more about the event please visit http://events.o-mun.org/243896/show.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/171271

Live Thursday Sept. 15 with Sam Chaltain on "Faces of Learning"

2011-09-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

Join me Thursday, September 15th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Sam Chaltain, DC-based writer and education activist, on his new book Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education. Sam was a guest last year on FutureofEducation.com to talk about his previous book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community, and we'll continue our conversation on education using his collection of the personal learning stories of fifty individuals–from well-known public figures to ordinary Americans–who share "inspirational stories about transformational teachers, powerful learning environments, and pivotal moments of self-discovery."

Date: Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is available at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-09-15.1730.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording can be accessed at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/chaltain2011.mp3. The LearnCentral event page is http://www.learncentral.org/node/171713.

Sam Chaltain is a DC-based writer and education activist. He works with schools, school districts, and public and private sector companies to help them create healthy, high-functioning learning environments.

Previously, Sam was the National Director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, an education advocacy organization, and the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, a national program that helps K-12 educators create more democratic learning communities.

Sam spent five years at the First Amendment Center as the co-director of the First Amendment Schools program. He came to the Center from the public school system of New York City, where he taught high school English and History. Sam also spent four years teaching the same subjects at a private school in Brooklyn.

Sam’s first teaching experience was in Beijing, China, where he joined the faculty of the Foreign Languages department at Beijing Normal University as a visiting lecturer. He taught two American History & Literature courses to third-year undergraduates.

Sam’s writings about his work have appeared in both magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Education Week and USA Today. A periodic contributor to CNN and MSNBC, Sam is also the author or co-author of five books: The First Amendment in Schools (ASCD, 2003); First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights (Oxford University Press, 2006); American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories Of Free Expression in America (Oxford, 2011); and Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Sam has a Master’s degree in American Studies from the College of William & Mary, and an M.B.A. from George Washington University, where he specialized in non-profit management and organizational theory. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he graduated with a double major in Afro-American Studies and History.

Live Tuesday Sept. 13 with Howard Gardner

2011-09-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

Join me Tuesday, September 13th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Harvard professor and well-known author Howard Gardner. In particular, we are going to talk about the new edition of his 1991 book, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, looking at school reform from the perspective of cognitive science and his work on multiple intelligences.

Date: Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-09-13.1430.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/howardgardner.mp3. The LearnCentral event page is http://www.learncentral.org/node/171686

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He has received honorary degrees from 26 colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, and South Korea. In 2005 and again in 2008, he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of 25 books translated into 28 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be adequately assessed by standard psychometric instruments.

During the past two decades, Gardner and colleagues at Project Zero have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the middle 1990s, in collaboration with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project--a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with long time Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has
conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James and other colleagues at Project Zero, he is also investigating the nature of trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Among new research undertakings are a study of effective collaboration among non-profit institutions in education and a study of conceptions of quality, nationally and internationally, in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic "The True, The Beautiful, and The Good: Reconsiderations in a post-modern, digital era."

Week of September 5, 2011 - Live and Interactive Webinars in Blackboard Collaborate

2011-09-03T19:24:00.000-07:00

The 2011 Worldwide Virtual Library Conference
November 2 - 3, All Free, All Online in Blackboard Collaborate
Submit to present or to be kept informed at http://www.Library2011.com

CSOV STUDENT NEWS (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Fri 9 Sep 08:00AM New York / Fri 9 Sep 12:00PM GMT / Fri 9 Sep 10:00PM Sydney
Molly Williams.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170354

CLASSROOM 2.0 LIVE-AZ TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION MATRIX (Classroom 2.0 LIVE)
Sat 10 Sep 12:00PM New York / Sat 10 Sep 04:00PM GMT / Sun 11 Sep 02:00AM Sydney
Peggy George. The topic for Saturday, September 10th will be “AZ Technology Integration Matrix” with special guest Cherie Stafford. Join us as Cherie shares how the Arizona Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) is used to help teachers integrate technology into the classroom. More information and session details are at http://live.classroom20.com. If you haven't used Blackboard Collaborate before (formerly Elluminate), we encourage you to view the Orientation Tutorial to prepare for the session. Each show begins at 12pm Eastern (GMT-5).
http://www.learncentral.org/node/171061

WORLD SAVVY AMERICAN YOUTH LEADERSHIP PROGRAM ORIENTATION (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Sat 10 Sep 03:00PM New York / Sat 10 Sep 07:00PM GMT / Sun 11 Sep 05:00AM Sydney
Laura Klivans.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170985

LEARN TO BE FOUNDATION NATIONAL INITIATION (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Sat 10 Sep 09:30PM New York / Sun 11 Sep 01:30AM GMT / Sun 11 Sep 11:30AM Sydney
Jingshen Zhao. Learn To Be provides free online tutoring in primary and secondary math, science and language arts. We welcome all teachers and parents to learn about how we work and where we are going this year. http://www.learntobe.org
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170932

Week of August 29, 2011 - Live and Interactive Webinars in Blackboard Collaborate

2011-08-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

Below are this week's public, free, and interactive Webinars through LearnCentral.org, the social learning network for education that I work on for Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate).

The time of the events below will show up automatically in your own time zone when you are registered in LearnCentral and when you have chosen your time zone in your profile, or you can check the new event time converter on the event page. Event recordings are posted and available after the events if you aren't able to attend them live. If you are looking for an easy calendar import / RSS feed for these events, you'll now find a link on your calendar page or the calendar page of specific groups!

We hope you will consider hosting your own public webinars using the free LearnCentral public room--instructions are available by joining the "Host Your Own Webinar" group on the main announcement tab (http://www.learncentral.org/group/3432/host-your-own-webinars).

Thanks for your attention, and see you online!

TECH TALK TUESDAYS: LEARNING TO SCRATCH (Australia Series)
Tue 29 Aug 02:00AM New York / Tue 30 Aug 06:00AM GMT / Tue 30 Aug 04:00PM Sydney
Anne Mirtschin. Marc Grossman, all the way from the UK will be our global presenter for this session. Learn how to use Scratch for effective learning and programming in your classroom. Scratch is a popular, free programming language for everyone.It has been developed by MIT and allows users to develop programming skills in a user friendly environmnet and to create interactive stories, games, music and art. Outcomes can be shared online. In this session, Marc will cover the following:- Learning to Scratch -What can Scratch be used for -Where to download Scratch from! -How to move and draw with Scratch -The different types of Scratch blocks -How to find resources for Scratch.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170274

DISEÑO DE PRESENTACIONES DIGITALES CON PREZI (Aula 2.0)
Tue 30 Aug 11:00AM New York / Tue 30 Aug 03:00PM GMT / Wed 31 Aug 01:00AM Sydney
Tomas Chaskel. Taller práctico básico sobre el uso de la herramienta gratuita Prezi para el diseño de presentaciones digitales interactivas: Creación de cuenta, configuración de una presentación, botones de herramientas (Zebra), creación de bloques de texto, agregar imágenes y vídeos, conectar nodos de conocimiento, vizualizar presentaciones, compartir enlaces y diseñar presentaciones colaborativas. EXPOSITOR: Prof. Antonio Delgado- Labora como Diseñador Instruccional en la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo. Administrador de plaraformas de eLearning: MOODLE, Blackboard y Edu 2.0, Bloguero Educativo (Edumorfosis), TuiterEducador (@edumorfosis), Educador Conectivista, Colaborador en las redes educativas: Aula 2.0, EducaPR, CLED y expositor en diferentes eventos educativos nacionales e internacionales.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170313

TALLER MEMORIAS EN RED - #DDHHYC (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Tue 30 Aug 11:30AM New York / Tue 30 Aug 03:30PM GMT / Wed 31 Aug 01:30AM Sydney
Luz Pearson. 2do encuentro de la comunidad de aprendizaje del curso Memorias en Red
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169725

RICHARD AND REBECCA DUFOUR ON PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES TO IMPROVE SCHOOLS (Future of Education Series)
Tue 30 Aug 05:00PM New York / Tue 30 Aug 09:00PM GMT / Wed 31 Aug 07:00AM Sydney
Steve Hargadon. Join me Tuesday, August 30th, at an earlier-than-normal time for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Richard and Rebecca DuFour on using Professional Learning Communities to improve schools.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170480

ADVOCACY IN YOUR LIBRARY PROGRAM (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Tue 30 Aug 07:30PM New York / Tue 30 Aug 11:30PM GMT / Wed 31 Aug 09:30AM Sydney
Lisa Perez. Attend this session to learn about advocacy tips for school librarians.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169832

SABERES 2.0 - DISEÑO DE PRESENTACIONES DIGITALES CON PREZI (Aula 2.0)
Tue 30 Aug 09:00PM New York / Wed 31 Aug 01:00AM GMT / Wed 31 Aug 11:00AM Sydney
Tomas Chaskel. Taller práctico básico sobre el uso de la herramienta gratuita Prezi para el diseño de presentaciones digitales interactivas: Creación de cuenta, configuración de una presentación, botones de herramientas (Zebra), creación de bloques de texto, agregar imágenes y vídeos, conectar nodos de conocimiento, vizualizar presentaciones, compartir enlaces y diseñar presentaciones colaborativas. EXPOSITOR: Prof. Antonio Delgado-Labora como Diseñador Instruccional en la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo. Administrador de plaraformas de eLearning: MOODLE, Blackboard y Edu 2.0, Bloguero Educativo (Edumorfosis), TuiterEducador (@edumorfosis), Educador Conectivista, Colaborador en las redes educativas: Aula 2.0, EducaPR, CLED y expositor en diferentes eventos educativos nacionales e internacionales.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170311

The 2011 Worldwide Virtual Library Conference
November 2 - 3, All Free, All Online in Blackboard Collaborate
Submit to present or to be kept informed at http://www.Library2011.com

EPCOP MOOC WEBINAR (Australia Series)
Wed 31 Aug 06:00AM New York / Wed 31 Aug 10:00AM GMT / Wed 31 Aug 08:00PM Sydney
Coach Carole. Webinar at 8 pm (Sydney time) Wednesday August 31st (note this event replaces the usual Tuesday session for the EpCoP MOOCers and is open to all.) My Showcase is an e-portfolio system with a difference! Dave Waller and David Sowden from My Showcase have stepped in to deliver an exciting look into their system that provides a neat segue between a personal learning space and an eportfolio. MyShowcase™ is an open source web application which offers personalised evidence gathering for e-portfolios. In our Bb C room at 8 pm (Sydney time) Join us in our Blackboard Collaborate room here: http://tinyurl.com/29tyznz See our googlesite for recording.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/167792

TAKE YOUR CLASSROOM GLOBAL! (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Wed 31 Aug 11:00PM New York / Thu 1 Sep 03:00AM GMT / Thu 1 Sep 01:00PM Sydney
Kate Lang. Today’s world is changing fast, and students need to be prepared to both compete and collaborate in an increasingly digitized and interconnected global society. Join Jennifer D. Klein of TakingITGlobal in this webinar to explore how to harness online tools to build transformative global learning experiences that build students’ technology skills while empowering them to be active global citizens. Sharing experiences garnered through 19 years teaching in a variety of settings, Jennifer will discuss the importance of global education and the potential of technology to connect students with global peers, humanizing global challenges and inspiring youth to work together for positive change.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169138

APRENDIZAJE EN RED CON USO DE TIC (ARTIC) - SESIÓN 3 (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Thu 1 Sep 07:00PM New York / Thu 1 Sep 11:00PM GMT / Fri 2 Sep 09:00AM Sydney
Diego Leal. Tercera sesión del curso abierto ArTIC (http://artic.pbworks.com
http://www.learncentral.org/node/170227

Live Tuesday August 30th (Early Time) with Richard and Rebecca DuFour on Professional Learning Communities to Improve Schools

2011-08-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

Join me Tuesday, August 30th, at an earlier-than-normal time for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Richard and Rebecca DuFour on using Professional Learning Communities to improve schools. The DuFours have made two papers available for those who would like to read up before the interview:

Date: Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
Time: 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 9pm GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-08-30.1411.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/dufours.mp3. The LearnCentral event page is http://www.learncentral.org/node/170480.

Rebecca B. DuFour, M.Ed., served as a teacher, school administrator and central office coordinator. As a former elementary principal, she helped her school earn state and national recognition as a model professional learning community and a Blue Ribbon School. She has co-authored nine books, was one of the featured principals in the 2001 Video Journal of Education production, “Leadership in an Age of Standards and High Stakes” and was the lead consultant and featured principal in their 2003 program, “Elementary Principals as Leaders of Learning.” She has written for numerous professional journals, reviewed books for the Journal of Staff Development and authored a quarterly column for Leadership Compass, published by the National Association of Elementary School Principals.

Richard DuFour, Ed.D, is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on applying the principles of professional learning communities in the real world of schools. He draws upon 34 years of experience as a public school educator – teacher, principal, and superintendent – and his two decades as a leader of one of the most recognized and celebrated schools in America, Adlai Stevenson High School District 125 in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Dr. DuFour has authored fourteen books, has published more than eighty articles on the Professional Learning Community concept, and served as a columnist for the Journal of Staff Development for nearly a decade. He has received numerous state and national awards for distinguished educational service and scholarship.

Week of August 22nd, 2011 - Live and Interactive Webinars in Blackboard Collaborate

2011-08-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

The 2011 Worldwide Virtual Library Conference
November 2 - 3, All Free, All Online in Blackboard Collaborate
Submit to present or to be kept informed at http://www.Library2011.com

THE KNOWLEDGE SHARING PLACE (The Knowledge Sharing Place)
Thu 25 Aug 07:00PM New York / Thu 25 Aug 11:00PM GMT / Fri 26 Aug 09:00AM Sydney
Dean Mantz. Come join Tina and Barbara, of LiveBinders, and Dean Mantz as we talk learning in the 21st Century classroom. Join the conversation as Tina and Barbara explain new enhancements in LiveBinders that aid in the ability for resources to be shared along with opportunity to create collaboratively. We will also be crowd sourcing a monthly webinar schedule to offer PD based sessions using Common Core Standards and STEM resources.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169159

BOB COMPTON ON THE FINLAND PHENOMENON (Future of Education Series)
Thu 25 Aug 08:00PM New York / Fri 26 Aug 12:00AM GMT / Fri 26 Aug 10:00AM Sydney
Steve Hargadon. Join Steve Hargadon on Thursday, August 25th, for a live and interactiveFutureofEducation.com webinar with Bob Compton, producer of the new documentary film The Finland Phenomenon, an "inside look at the world's finest secondary education system." Narrated by Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard (a previous guest on our show), the film does a very good job of showing the surprising factors that educators and policy-makers in Finland believe accounts for their consistently being ranked as one of the best (if not the best) education system in the world--including students starting school at age 7, limited homework and testing, highly-esteemed and compensated teachers, and "trust" at all levels. We'll talk about these and other fascinating aspects of education in Finland for an hour with Bob.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169777

THE "MENDELEY": A FREE REFERENCES MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Thu 25 Aug 04:30PM New York / Thu 25 Aug 08:30PM GMT / Fri 26 Aug 06:30AM Sydney
Hery The. In general, references management software is expensive. On the other hand, in the digital era, with the increasing in demand of school works, students couldn't afford to use it. The "Mendeley" provides free services online and offline for free. In this presentation, I will guide participants step by step on sign up and download Mendeley to their computer/mobile devices. In addition, I will do a demo on how to "cite while you write", and "manage library/references".
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168875

CLASSROOM 2.0 LIVE-FEATURED TEACHER CAROLYN STANLEY (Classroom 2.0 LIVE)
Sat 27 Aug 12:00PM New York / Sat 27 Aug 04:00PM GMT / Sun 28 Aug 02:00AM Sydney
Peggy George. Saturday, August 27th will be another session of our “Featured Teacher” series featuring Carolyn Stanley. Join us as Carolyn shares ways she uses technology to motivate and engage her Middle School students. She will be sharing her experiences as an evolving teacher- from the traditional to one who is always learning about how technology can enhance our classrooms and make them vibrant student-centered learning stations Classroom 2.0 LIVE is an opportunity to gather with other member of the community in regular "live" web meetings. Special thanks for this go to our sponsor, Blackboard Collaborate, for providing the service that allows us to do this! Thanks so much for being a part of this community!
http://www.learncentral.org/node/169409

Live Thursday August 25th with Bob Compton on The Finland Phenomenon

2011-08-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

Join me Thursday, August 25th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Bob Compton, producer of the new documentary film The Finland Phenomenon, an "inside look at the world's finest secondary education system." Narrated by Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard (a previous guest on our show), the film does a very good job of showing the surprising factors that educators and policy-makers in Finland believe accounts for their consistently being ranked as one of the best (if not the best) education system in the world--including students starting school at age 7, limited homework and testing, highly-esteemed and compensated teachers, and "trust" at all levels. We'll talk about these and other fascinating aspects of education in Finland for an hour with Bob.

Date: Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-08-25.1639.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording can be downloaded at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/bobcompton.mp3. The LearnCentral event page is http://www.learncentral.org/event/169777

The Finland Phenomenon. Finland's education system has consistently ranked among the best in the world for more than a decade. The puzzle is, why Finland? Documentary filmmaker, Bob Compton, along with Harvard researcher, Dr. Tony Wagner, decided to find out. The result of their research is captured in a new film, "The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System. In the 60-minute film, Dr. Wagner guides the viewer through an inside look at the world’s finest secondary education system. A life-long educator and author of the best-selling book "The Global Achievement Gap, Dr. Wagner is uniquely qualified to explore and explain Finland’s success. From within classrooms and through interviews with students, teachers, parents, administrators and government officials, Dr. Wagner reveals the surprising factors accounting for Finland's rank as the #1 education system in the world.

From Bob's website: "My name is Robert Compton but my friends call me Bob. I have been around since the fifties and am glad to have lived during such interesting times. I have a wide range of interests and I hope that you and I can learn something from each other.

"I graduated from Principia College with a Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduation I began my career in systems operations with Telenet Communications, the first X.25 communications network. I joined IBM Corporation initially as a systems engineer, and later became a sales representative selling mainframe computer systems. I left IBM to continue my education at Harvard University Graduate School of Business where I received my Masters in Business Administration.

"A year after Harvard, I landed a position at First Chicago Venture Capital. From there, I moved to Indiana where I served as a general partner at CID Equity Partners from 1987 to 1997. My signature deal was help-desk software developer Software Artistry, which went public in 1995 and was acquired two years later by IBM for about $200 Million. I was President and Chief Operating Officer of Sofamor Danek Group, Inc., which at the time was the world’s largest supplier of implants, computer-assisted surgery products, and biologics for spinal surgery. Medtronic acquired Sofamor Danek Group, Inc. in January 1999 for $3.7 billion. I have served on numerous corporate Boards of Directors in an array of industries and have been the lead investor in over 20 businesses, five of which have had successful public offerings. I am currently the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vontoo Corporation, the Founder and CEO of True South Studios, as well as the Founder and Chairman of Indian Math Online.

"I am an active philanthropist, who has endowed scholarships at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, given a grant to support Teach for America and the University of Memphis School of Business. I have given research grants to InMotion Musculoskeletal Research Institute, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I have also given money to support St. George’s High School, Exchange City, Memphis, and the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

"After traveling to India in 2005, I was inspired to create the documentary Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination to take a deeper look at how the three superpowers of the 21st Century-China, India and the United States are preparing their students for the future. As the American public school system fails to adapt to this century, schools in China and India produce four times the number of high school graduates as the U.S. and educate these students to a much higher level. After revealing the decline of American Education in Two Million Minutes, I searched the world for a solution to the education crisis. Two Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution demonstrates that American students are capable of competing globally given the right curriculum, the right teachers, and expectation for success. Despite the decline of public education, the decades ahead can be ones of prosperity and economic growth, provided the American people have the gumption to embrace the 21st Century Solution. In 2009, I released a documentary, which opens a window into Chinese capitalism. Win In China is the world’s largest and most lucrative business-plan competition, and beneath the game show’s surface lies a subtle view of Chinese business practices, ambitions, ethical norms and competitive behaviors."

Free Teacher 2.0 Workshop in Melbourne August 30th

2011-08-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be in Melbourne, Australia, in a couple of weeks and thanks to some great networking by Andrew Hiskens and Hamish Curry (with thanks also to Anne Mirtschin and Jenny Luca) I'm going to be leading a free, all-day workshop at the amazing Experimedia in the State Library of Victoria. The title of the workshop is: Teacher 2.0: Your Personal and Professional Growth.

This is a project I've been working on for the last few months, with the goal of helping educators learn to use the Web for their own learning--in part to help them understand where these tools will have pedagogical value for them in the classroom, but also to help them rejuvenate their own learning and careers. I continue to believe that we cannot expect educators to teach "21st Century Skills" if they aren't experiencing the benefits of these technologies personally, and that the surest way to improving education is to help educators become "lead learners" and in a position to influence their students and public policy.

If you're in the Melbourne area, I hope you'll join us!

Date: Tuesday 30 August, 8:30am – 4pm

Venue: State Library of Victoria, Experimedia. Main Entry, Swanston Street

Cost: FREE

Bookings: http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/event/teacher-20-your-personal-and-professional-growth

Description: Dramatic changes are going to continue to take place in education because of the Web. While change is never easy, but always constant, the Web is providing amazing new opportunities for educators to explore their own interests and passions, build personal learning networks, and have a significant impact on their students, their schools, and their own careers. This exclusive hands-on, FREE workshop will explore these trends and help you, as the "lead learner", build educational resources for you and your students. A personal laptop or mobile device is highly recommended. Places are strictly limited; catering included. Registration is from 8:30am for a prompt start at 9am.

Supported by:

Schedule:
8:30 am – Participant arrival and registration. Tea and coffee will be served
9:00 am – Welcome and overview of the day's sessions (this will start promptly at 9.00 am so please be on time)
9:15 am – Introductory session 'Starting with Yourself: Interests and Passions'
9:30 am – School 2.0: The Teacher as Lead Learner
10:15 am – Morning Tea
10:30 am – Building Your "Personal Web Presence" (PWP)
12:00 pm – Lunch (please advise of dietary requirements upon booking)
1:00 pm – Building Your "Personal Learning Network" (PLN)
2:30 pm – Afternoon Tea
2:45 pm – Project Building
3:45 pm – Concluding session: wrap-up and Sharing
4:00 pm – End

Week of August 14, 2011 - Live and Interactive Webinars in Blackboard Collaborate

2011-08-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

Below are this week's public, free, and interactive Webinars through LearnCentral.org, the social learning network for education that I work on for Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate).

The time of the events below will show up automatically in your own time zone when you are registered in LearnCentral and when you have chosen your time zone in your profile, or you can check the new event time converter on the event page. Event recordings are posted and available after the events if you aren't able to attend them live. If you are looking for an easy calendar import / RSS feed for these events, you'll now find a link on your calendar page or the calendar page of specific groups!

We hope you will consider hosting your own public webinars using the free LearnCentral public room--instructions are available by joining the "Host Your Own Webinar" group on the main announcement tab (http://www.learncentral.org/group/3432/host-your-own-webinars).

Thanks for your attention, and see you online!

COLLABORATE INTERACTIVE SLIDE DESIGN (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Mon 15 Aug 01:00PM New York / Mon 15 Aug 05:00PM GMT / Tue 16 Aug 03:00AM Sydney
Tammy Moore. This webinar will be a sharing of best practices for interactive design of activities for the Collaborate version 11 platform. We will look at how to use the new features and the old favorites to design slides to make the whiteboard an interactive experience for the moderator and participants. Come and share your favorite tips and tricks as well as wbds. No need to RSVP. Just drop on in.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168496

EPCOP MOOC WEBINAR (Australia Series)
Mon 15 Aug 09:00PM New York / Tue 16 Aug 01:00AM GMT / Tue 16 Aug 11:00AM Sydney
Coach Carole. EpCoP MOOC webinar
http://www.learncentral.org/node/167790

TECH TALK TUESDAYS: THE STUDENT VOICE (Australia Series)
Tue 15 Aug 02:00AM New York / Tue 16 Aug 06:00AM GMT / Tue 16 Aug 04:00PM Sydney
Anne Mirtschin. Scott Duncan (@sduncan0101) will discuss the necessity of listening to students, valuing their opinions and including them in the school decision making processes. Scott recently presented a similar session at the Innovations Showcase for the Department of Education in Victoria, Australia. If time permits, he will share innovative uses of technology in his classroom and school.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168917

THE VALUE OF PEER COACHING (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Tue 16 Aug 01:00PM New York / Tue 16 Aug 05:00PM GMT / Wed 17 Aug 03:00AM Sydney
Matt Huston. Teachers and schools face enormous challenges, from new technologies that shape how students learn, to declining budgets for professional development, to rising expectations for student achievement. Learn how Peer Coaching can help align professional development with 21st Century teaching and learning practices. Peer Coaching was recently recognized by ISTE as providing "highly effective professional development" for teachers. (http://www.iste.org/learn/coaching-white-paper.aspx) Understand why Peer Coaching works, what coaches and the teachers they work with gain from Peer Coaching, and how to get started with Peer Coaching.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168451

INTERVIEW WITH DR. GARY LOPEZ ON HIPPOCAMPUS.ORG (Future of Education Series)
Tue 16 Aug 08:00PM New York / Wed 17 Aug 12:00AM GMT / Wed 17 Aug 10:00AM Sydney
Steve Hargadon. Join Steve Hargadon for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Dr. Gary Lopez to discuss HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.
http://www.learncentral.org/event/168964

The 2011 Worldwide Virtual Library Conference
November 2 - 3, All Free, All Online in Blackboard Collaborate
Submit to present or to be kept informed at http://www.Library2011.com

SERVICE-LEARNING (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Wed 17 Aug 05:00AM New York / Wed 17 Aug 09:00AM GMT / Wed 17 Aug 07:00PM Sydney
Keith Wilson. Service-learning is an instructional approach that engages students while increasing academic achievement by providing rigour and relevance in the curriculum. It promotes cognitive, social-emotional, and experiential engagement in meaningful learning. In quality service-learning experiences, teachers guide students through a learning process that facilitates high academic performance and empowers them to enact genuine social change in their communities. In these regular sessions participants will be shown ways that service-learning can be introduced into schools without disrupting established norms until it’s seen as the right thing to do. Opportunities for sharing your own best practice are actively sought and encouraged.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168577

GAME BASED LEARNING - AN INTRODUCTION (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Thu 18 Aug 02:00PM New York / Thu 18 Aug 06:00PM GMT / Fri 19 Aug 04:00AM Sydney
Margaret Keane. During this webinar, Patrick will be introducing the concept of Game-based Learning, explain how it can be employed in instructional settings, and provide practical information on how to harness this engaging medium.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/167251

INTERVIEW WITH JEFF PIONTEK (Future of Education Series)
Thu 18 Aug 08:00PM New York / Fri 19 Aug 12:00AM GMT / Fri 19 Aug 10:00AM Sydney
Steve Hargadon. Join Steve Hargadon for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Jeff Piontek, Head of School at Hawaii Technology Academy, on on education change and reform.
http://www.learncentral.org/event/168966

LEARNING FORWARD WA EXEC BD WEBINAR (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Thu 18 Aug 09:30PM New York / Fri 19 Aug 01:30AM GMT / Fri 19 Aug 11:30AM Sydney
Shelee King George. LFWA Exec Board prepares to lead a webinar on the national professional learning standards. Although a planning meeting in the Blackboard Interface, feel free to stop in and help us plan. You may want to do something similar with local schools in your area as well.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168811

ADOBE YOUTH VOICES AND POV (Classroom 2.0 LIVE)
Sat 20 Aug 12:00PM New York / Sat 20 Aug 04:00PM GMT / Sun 21 Aug 02:00AM Sydney
Peggy George, Kim Caise, & Lorna Costantini. The topic for Saturday, August 20th will be “Adobe Youth Voices POV” with special guests Kim Flack and Leslie Rule. Kim and Leslie will share about “Project VoiceScape”, a collaboration between the Adobe Youth Foundation and PBS’ POV which hosted a contest for middle and high school students through documentary videos, photography, print media, radio diaries, animation, Web communications and other media. Students that participated in this project will share their videos and experiences throughout the competition.
http://live.classroom20.com/

"LEARN TO BE" NATIONAL LEADERSHIP EXCHANGE (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Sat 20 Aug 09:30PM New York / Sun 21 Aug 01:30AM GMT / Sun 21 Aug 11:30AM Sydney
Jingshen Zhao. Learn To Be provides free online tutoring in primary and secondary math, science and language arts. Please join us if you are interested to meet with student leaders from our various university chapters (http://learntobe.org/university-chapters) as we exchange best practices discuss updates in our national network.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/167551

ONLINE MODEL UNITED NATIONS DEBATES - FALL 2011 KICK-OFF (Host Your Own Webinar Series)
Sun 21 Aug 09:00AM New York / Sun 21 Aug 01:00PM GMT / Sun 21 Aug 11:00PM Sydney
Jingshen Zhao. More information can be found on http://o-mun.org. We are going to introduce how a Blackboard Collaborate room can be used to host debates between youth delegates. We will also be introducing Twitter and iEtherpad as tools for research and paper writing.
http://www.learncentral.org/node/168839