Live Thursday, February 2nd - Panel on Personal Learning Profiles

Join me today, Thursday, February 2nd, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com panel discussion on "Personal Learning Profiles," also referred to in variously as "personal success plans," "learner profiles," or "personalized learning paths."  Joining us are Barbara Bray, Kathleen McClaskey, Shannon Miller, and Lisa Nielsen to tell us about their work in this area and to answer our questions. With a growing sense of the value of personalized, customized, and student-driven learning, what is the best way to capture and communicate students' learning plans and goals? Who should "own" these profiles/plans, both in terms of responsibility and ultimate control? How can and should personal learning profiles interact with student portfolios? And my perennial question: in a vision of teachers as lead-learners, what provisions are being made to bring personal learning profiles to the profession itself?

Date: Thursday, February 2nd, 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=2012-02-02.1707.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/personallearning.mp3.

Barbara Bray is a Creative Learning Strategist who believes that anyone at any age can learn. She has worked with schools, districts, individuals, businesses, and non-profit agencies around the world. Her dream has been to create an online place that was safe and secure with all the tools and resources all in one place. She did it with My eCoach as early as 1999 — way before there were blogs, wikis, Twitter or Facebook. Barbara is what you call a “Digital Pioneer.”

Barbara is a teacher, writer, change agent, risk-taker, instructional designer, connector, and visionary. Whenever anyone told Barbara she couldn’t do something, she took it more like a challenge. Barbara knows that teachers need support with the shift to 21st Century Skills. New and veteran teachers are overwhelmed with day-to-day tasks plus being asked to teach and integrate technology. The big question even today is “how do you fit everything in that is expected of you and meet the needs of all students?”

Barbara writes a regular column on professional development for OnCUE (Computer Using Educators) as well as regularly posts helpful materials and resources on her blog. She works tirelessly to find and research new tools and methods that help educators. Now with multiple opportunities to network using social media and join various online communities, teachers and learners are confused. Barbara makes it her job to determine what is authentic, valid, cost-effective, safe, user-friendly, and relevant for her clients. Find her on the web at http://barbarabray.net or email barbara.bray@gmail.com.

Kathleen H. McClaskey, resident of Ed Tech Associates, is a recognized UDL and Digital Learning Consultant with 28 years experience in using technology in the classroom. Kathleen is a frequent international, national and regional workshop presenter on topics that include Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Technology for Diverse Learners, Math and Technology: Bringing Research to Practice, Built in Moodle: The Universally Designed Digital Learning Environment and most recently, Personalized Learning Toolkit with Barbara Bray. In the last decade, she directed and designed the professional development in technology-based projects in math, science, literacy and autism. She currently curates four topics in Scoop.it:  Personalized Learning, Universal Design for Learning, Leveling the Playing Field with Apps and Math, Technology and UDL:  Closing the Achievement Gap.  Twitter: @khmmc

Shannon McClintock Miller is the district teacher librarian and technology specialist at Van Meter Community School in Van Meter, Iowa. She encourages her students to have a voice while learning, creating, collaborating, and connecting to others within their school and around the world. Shannon is the author of the award winning Van Meter Library Voice blog and enjoys writing for ISTE's Leading & Learning journal, various blogs, and in other forums. She has had the opportunity to speak in Iowa and around the country about advocacy, technology, social media, and making a difference in education and the lives of others. She is a member of ISTE, SIGMS, ALA, AASL, and ILA (Iowa Library Association). Shannon serves as the advocacy chair on the Iowa Association of School Librarians and on the Iowa Center for the Book Advisory Council as the public school students and libraries representation. Shannon also serves on the School Library Month advisory board. She is a StudyBlue Teacher Advocate and FableVision Learning Ambassador. In 2010, she was also chosen to be part of the Cengage Learning/School Library Journal New Leaders Program. In March 2011, Shannon was awarded the Connecting People Shorty Award. Shannon can be found at @shannonmmiller on Twitter and online at shannonmmiller.com.

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 and Learning, ISTE Connects, ASCD Wholechild, MindShift, Leading and Learning, The Unplugged Mom, and is the author the book Teaching Generation Text.

News: Cable Green on Open Policy; The Classroom 2.0 Book!; PBS NewsHour Feedback; CUEunplugged; Gaming in Ed Virtual Conference; Podcast with Audrey Watters

This has been an exciting week, and it's only half over! Building on my primary focus this year to build several virtual and physical conferences, you'll see we've set dates for four events below, and have a couple more on the active drawing board. But that's not all...

TONIGHT:

• Join me as I talk tonight with Cable Green from Creative Commons for the FutureofEducation.com interview series. He'll be covering his favorite topic right now, "The Obviousness of Open Policy," and we'll talk about this straightforward proposal to require that government-funded work be released under open licensing. More details, with instructions on joining in the live session HERE.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Classroom 2.0 celebrate's it's 5th anniversary in March, and to celebrate we've created a community-sourced Classroom 2.0 publishing project to build a treasury of your best wisdom and practices for using the Web in education. Not just the creation of a book, but also the building of an ecosystem to encourage and provide YOU now and in the future with the opportunity to take new leaps in this world of peer-expertise--and in particular, to becoming a published author. :)  Join the project HERE.
• Are you a "computer-using educator" in the western states? If so, you'll either be attending the CUE conference March 15 - 17, or you should be! No pressure, but this year--like we do at ISTE--we're running a bunch of cool community activities in and around the formal events, including an all-day SocialEdCon (formerly EduBloggerCon) that is now going to be all day on Thursday, the first full day of the conference! We'll also be doing a one-day anyone-can-present series in our own room this year on Friday, and (of course) an all-conference Bloggers' Cafe. Do we dare say it will be more fun than you've ever had at CUE?! More information at http://www.CUEunplugged.com.
• The first-ever, Classroom 2.0 Gaming in Education virtual conference will be April 26th! With intial sponsorship from BrainPOP to get this conference off the ground, it will be in the great spirit of our other inclusive and free conferences that we like to think are game-changers (smile) and bring people together from all over the world. Look for more information and announcements at Classroom20.com.
• The Future of Libraries world-wide conference, Library 2.012, now has dates:  October 3 - 5. Wahoo! Huge thank to the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San José State University for stepping up to be the founding sponsor again this year! Sign up at http://www.library20.com.
• We've also set dates for the 2012 Global Education Conference:  November 12 - 16. Again, all free, all virtual, and the best fun you can have without sleeping for five days!  http://www.globaledcon.com.
• On the drawing board, and just looking for dates:  a "Search Matters" virtual conference on the importance of search literacy (with a little help from our friends at Google!), and AltEdCon, the first world-wide virtual conference on alternative education:  homeschooling, unschooling, distance learning, etc.

OTHER EVENTS:

• David Loertscher was on the FutureofEducation.com interview series last night to talk about the "learning commons" and about "personal learning environments," and his recordings are posted HERE. Last week we heard from Lee Crockett on 21st-century "fluencies" (HERE). Hundreds of other interview recordings can be found HERE.
• Tomorrow night is an amazing panel on "Personal Learning Profiles" with Lisa Nielsen, Barbara Bray, Kathleen McClaskey, and Shannon Miller. I'm a little behind, but the blog post will appear at http://www.stevehargadon.com later today or early tomorrow!
• Next week, our guests on FutureofEducation.com will be Laurette Lynn ("the unplugged mom") and Alan Blankstein.
• The next Classroom 2.0 Saturday LIVE! show will be February 4th on "Using Evernote in the Classroom" with guest Wiliam Stites. 
• Be sure, if you are going to ISTE this year (June 23 - 26) in San Diego that you consider booking yourself to get in Friday night so that you can attend our 5th-year of what used to be called EduBloggerCon but is now SocialEdCon. Oh, and it's just the start of 5 days of incredible fun all rolled up in a package of alternate and community-led events called ISTEunplugged! Do join us!

EDINCUBATOR:

• Our first teacher/student/educator council in EdIncubator has started! It's the PBS NewsHour, and they are very anxious to hear from you as they build out their teaching materials. Join them HERE. The good folks at PBS are helping us test this service out, and we've got a bit of a waiting list going for other startups and organizations looking to do the same, so be sure to contact me at steve@hargadon.com for more details if this sounds like something you'd like to set up for your organization.

HACK EDUCATION PODCAST:

• If you haven't become acquainted with the cutting and ironic humor of Audrey Watters yet, you just must listen in on our somewhat irreverent look at educational technology each week. The podcast link is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechlive/hackeducation. (Her rant about Apple's misguided education announcement two weeks ago was only exceeded by her thoughts this week about Pearson becoming a sponsor of Startup Weekend edu! Recorded at Science Leadership Academy where we were actually physically together, this week's recording isn't at our normal sound quality level... sorry!)

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES:

• Many of the free community activities that I bring to you through Web 2.0 Labs are looking for appropriate and authentic sponsorship! Email me if you'd like to support one of the events or activities above.

Have a great week!

Call for Submissions - The Classroom 2.0 Fifth Anniversary Book Project!

Dear Friends:

This March marks the 5th anniversary of Classroom 2.0. Wow! It's pretty amazing to think of all that has happened in the world of social media and education during this time, and I'm especially grateful for the role that Classroom 2.0 has been able to play in what (I think) are ultimately significant opportunities to rethink and refocus education on the participation models of Web 2.0.

A HUGE thanks to each of you in Classroom 2.0 (or one of the other educational networks), whether you're celebrating your own five years or just five days!

For this milestone, I've been looking to do something for and with the community as a whole. (Of course, if you know me at all by now, you know there is a virtual event/celebration in store... but more on that later :) The more I played with the idea of a community-sourced Classroom 2.0 publishing project, the more excited I got about it. However, this would not just be the creation of a book, or just the collection of your best wisdom and practices, but it would also the building of an ecosystem that encourages and provides YOU now and in the future with the opportunity to take new leaps in this world of peer-expertise--and in particular, to becoming a published author (and there's an author in many of you waiting to come out, I know!).

For those who have already taken that leap and have been writing or publishing, my hope is that this will be a way to give you exposure to the larger Classroom 2.0 and other educational networks audience. Feel free to submit things that you have already written, as long as you have the rights to do so. I'm teaming up with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), and our combined audience reach should be over 125,000 educator right off the bat.

So here it is! This is the official call for chapter submissions for Classroom 2.0: The Book. EVERY chapter submission received will be posted and promoted on Classroom 2.0 as a stand-alone "white paper" available for free to download. Even if (and particularly if!) you've never written a chapter or whitepaper before, or been part of a book project, we really want and encourage you to do this.

You are or are becoming the experts, believe it or not. You've been working with these tools in the classroom, library, media center, your home, or other educational venues and we want other educators (and the world) to know about your experiences, your successes, your not-so-successes, and everything else that has mattered as you've used emerging technologies to inform or change teaching and learning in the education world. For all that is said about "21st century classrooms," you are likely already leading the way in something you actually do. We hope you will consider sharing your expertise and practical ideas for using Web 2.0 and emerging technologies in education.

We will be selecting some number of the submissions and inviting those authors to allow us to publishing their chapter an actual physical volume/book which will be printed and sold (and if we are lucky, maybe even distributed by a publisher who can make your work known even more widely). The book will be an anthology of the most compelling practices and best examples for using emerging technologies in schools, and we are hoping it will be widely recommended, purchased, used, and passed around! We hope it will help an even wider audience to learn more about what "Classroom 2.0" looks like, especially those teachers, administrators, parent, an policy-makers who don't yet understand the value to students of the engagement, voice, connectivity, and awareness that these tools can bring to teaching and learning.

We are giving you a lot of latitude on the topic and structure of your contributions, and you are also welcome to submit as many chapters/whitepapers as you would like. To be considered for inclusion in the printed book, we encourage that your chapter(s) be no longer than 2500 words and be geared toward the practical with learning objectives and examples of activities. We aren't discouraging "thought leadership" material, some of which will definitely be included in the book, but the book will predominately weighted toward practice and the practical. (We do reserve the right to not publish material that is not related to technology in education, is offensive in any way, or does not meet basic minimum standards for readability.) Whether your chapter is available online and/or is included in the book, you will own the rights to your own material and you are free to republish in any other medium without needing to contact us. You are also welcome to submit work you have published previously as long as you can still provide us with the rights to publish on our side.

When I think of all the amazing work that you are doing with the tools of the web--blogs, wikis, podcasts, social media, social networking, virtual learning and conferences, gaming, search/web/media literacies and fluencies, participative technologies, etc.--I cannot wait to see and share your submissions. We will start taking (and posting) submissions immediately and indefinitely, but to be considered for publication in the physical book, your submission(s) must be received by March 15th, 2012.

Submission instructions and more detail are available HERE, and there is a forum area at the bottom of that page where you can ask questions in case we've missed something important or you just need clarification. We do feel a deeper mission with this project, and hope you will join us in this effort.

See you online!

Steve
Steve Hargadon, Founder, Classroom 2.0

with Richard Byrne and Chris Dawson

Live Interview Wednesday, February 1st - Cable Green on "The Obviousness of Open Policy"

Join me Wednesday, February 1st, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Cable Green on "The Obviousness of Open Policy." The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world, Cable says, in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the "iron triangle" of access, cost and quality with new models, he argues that we need to educate policy makers about the obviousness of open policy: public access to publicly funded resources.

Date: Wednesday, February 1st, 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=2012-02-01.1618.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/cablegreen2012.mp3.

Cable Green leads the Education projects at Creative Commons as Director of Global Learning. He mixes digital technologies, open licensing, standards and policies to significantly improve access to quality, affordable, open educational resources. Cable is a strong advocate for open policies that ensure publicly funded education materials are freely and openly available to the public that paid for them.

Previously, as Director of eLearning and Open Education for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, he led a project to build and share highest enrolled courses under a CC BY license. They call it the “Open Course Library.”

He also served as the Director of Technology for the Ohio Learning Network and Director of Educational Technology for the Ohio State University College of Pharmacy where he built Ohio State’s first online doctoral program. He earned his PhD (educational technology) from Ohio State University, MA (communication) from Ohio State, MPC from Westminster College, and BS (international affairs) from Lewis and Clark College.

Live Interview Tuesday, January 31st - David Loertscher on Physical and Virtual Learning Commons and Building Personal Learning Environments

Join me Tuesday, January 31st, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with David Loertscher, professor at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University and proponent of the library as a new learning commons. In this follow-up to our previous interview, we're going to drill down on the current state of libraries in our visions of education, how the idea of the New Learning Commons could be influence those visions, and how we help students and adults create their own "Personal Learning Environments."

Date: Tuesday, January 31st, 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=2012-01-31.1627.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/davidloertscher2012.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 José 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 Librarians.

David Jakes on the Most Important Issue in Education Today

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

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 is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/leecrockett.mp3.

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.