Room With A View

While attending David Warlick’s Gaming Session at Learning 2.008 last week it struck me that what I write and what most people write on their blogs is in danger of becoming info noise. It’s like white noise. With white noise, discrete sounds are present but they blend together so that each  sound is indistinguishable from the others. In the same way, thousands of blog posts blend together to make them indistinguishable–info noise.

These thoughts were further solidified with the NY Times article How Many Web Services Can One Person Use?

Tagging may help. I think David nailed it when he started his session by giving us the tags he’d like us to use when blogging or tweeting about his session. It may not save our writings from being lost in the general info noise of the web but it would at least help those attending the session find each other’s work. It would help create what Ewan McIntosh calls “small passionate communities.”

I’m back to Beijing which means Edublogs is blocked again! grr… I don’t know what they did at Learning 2.008 but it was nice to be able to get to my blog again.

An article in the NY Times asks this question and points to the difficulties in having so many web services. There’s only so much time in a day.

As a tech coordinator, I’m very careful when recommending sites or tools to teachers. They’re busy. I see my role as doing some of the leg work–finding worthwhile tools and helping them see ways to apply them to their teaching.

I attended Ewan McIntosh’s session first thing this morning. It’s filled my mind with a million things. I’m not sure there’s room for anything else today.

He spoke about people–students and teachers–finding small passionate communities. So often people think they need to have a huge readership on their blogs or hundreds of friends on Facebook. Instead McIntosh suggests it’s about having a “small compassionate community.” I think he’s right.

This morning a colleague and I discussed teacher blogging. I don’t think every teacher needs a blog to reflect on personal practice. I think reflection is important but there are many ways to reflect. A blog is just one way. (Remember conversation?)

Having said this, I do think there’s room for most teachers to use blogging tools/technology. Blogs are a quick easy way for a teacher to post to his/her “small compassionate community”–students and parents.

Attending Learning 2.0 08 in Shanghai. More posts to come but you can check it out at the conference Ning site.

Does anyone know if Podcast Producer can work with the .swf files that are made with Jing?

Thanks to Wesley Fryer for pointing out the Year Three evaluation report of the Texas Technology Immersion Project. It’s well worth a read as we look at the merits of a one to one program at my school. The study identifies the four “highest immersion” schools and then identifies the factors that caused the schools to be high immersion.

There’s nothing too earth shaking here but it’s good common sense and well worth a read.

This year all teachers at my school received laptops. That’s not so earth shattering but it is a step in the right direction. It hasn’t been without controversy but generally I think things are going okay.

The reason for giving teachers laptops was to improve their tech skills with the result that they will integrate more technology into their teaching. I hope it will be successful but I’m concerned that the potential is being limited by laptops that are locked down.Teachers cannot customize them in any way. They can’t add software or configure them to work the way they think. Even something as simple as adding Google Notebook to I.E. is not possible.

I understand why the IT folks have done this. They are concerned about security. They want to keep everything working. I understand this yet, I don’t think we’ll achieve the full potential for learning if teachers can’t customize their machines. Unless teachers can customize and make the machines theirs, I don’t think we’ll see the gains that people are hoping for.