Multi-faceted Refractions

In what seems to be the fastest three weeks that I can remember, the K12 Online Conference is nearly complete. There are only four presentations left to be posted and then When Night Falls begins. Then the conversation continues, but outside the narrow window of the conference.

The challenge remains on how we as individuals are going to sustain the momentum and continue the conversations, sharing our experiences, successes, and identifying our obstacles.

For me, it has been a great experience. I am gathering my reflections both on creating my presentation and on helping to organize When Night Falls. I have learned much from the process.

Using my new “toy”, no now being enlightened by Liz Kolb, my new tool, I have created a podcast recapping my thoughts after participating in the first 48 hours of the K12 Online Conference.

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With all of the excitement which is being generated by David Warlick’s Pre-Conference Keynote and anticipation of the remaining 40 sessions over the next three weeks, it is difficult to imagine the end of the K12 Online Conference. When Night Falls, the closing event of the conference is looming on the horizon and we are seeking volunteers to make this event a fitting end to what promises to be an outstanding conference. When Night Falls, which will begin on October 27th at 0:00 GMT. (To see what time this begins in your time zone - World Time Conversion) As night falls across the planet, educators across the globe are encouraged to participate in this culminating event, This event will be a 24 hour opportunity for participants in the 2007 K12 Online conference to gather around a virtual water cooler or have a virtual shared coffee break, to reflect and connect with friends, both old and new, about their experiences at K12 Online 2007. The purpose of When Night Falls is twofold:

1. To give participants an opportunity to share reflections, to build networks and relationships and to make connections with each other. Some of the connections people make at K12 Online will grow into global collaborations for students and support networks for all of us as we continue to push the boundaries of teaching and learning in the 21st century.
2. To get feedback on this year’s conference as we begin to plan for next year.

Since When Night Falls is going to run for 24 hours, we’re looking for people who are willing to volunteer to be moderators for this event. For me personally, many of individuals who I got to meet during last year’s When Night Falls I now count amongst my friends. They have provided me opportunities to grow and learn both professionally and personally. And from this group, I have been introduced to an even larger pool of people who now fall within my friendship group. I now feel that I can travel nearly anywhere throughout the world and know that I can connect and share with these great people. In brief, we are asking each moderator to:

• host and moderate an Elluminate session for 1-2 hours — if you don’t know how to do that, we’ll teach you!
• record some information on a wiki, over the course of their show, solicited from the participants, to help us create an even better experience next year. Ask people to share their:
  • bouquets (what we did well)
  • brickbats (what we didn’t do well)
  • suggestions for next year
• write a 200 word or less summary on the wiki of what the discussion was about during your segment.
• record the session. If you don’t know how to do that, we’ll teach you!
• encourage everyone to register their participation by entering their location and blog address on the Conference Attendr Map if they haven’t already.

To register, you can visit the When Night Falls Wiki and fill in the pertinent information. We look forward to your participation. Don’t know how to use Elluminate? Tutorials will be available and practice rooms will be available during the last week of the conference.

On Monday morning, the K12 Online conference released its pre-conference keynote “presentation“. This year, David Warlick presented Inventing New Boundaries. Here are my take aways from this presentation.

1. David changed the metaphor from the railway to the airport

This is an apt switch, since teachers need to switch their role in the classroom from that of a railroad engineer, pulling the students along a common path, with some excursions down the side rails, all together to that of the teacher as a air traffic controller. Each student is like their own airplane, with their own flight plan. The teacher has to orchestrate all of the movement in the classroom so that each child is able to complete their own flight with minimal delays. In some cases, they are going to have to team up together in order to accomplish this goal, but everyone is following his or her own plan.

2. The metaphor of Ender’s Game

In Ender’s Game, the hero of the book, Ender Wiggin, is a six year old who is selected to attend the elite Battle School. At the school, he is singled out and kept away from the other students, made special. Ender finds a way to create a network of the other students despite the efforts of the teachers to teach other students his tactics in the battle game. Ender shares strategies with the older students. As Ender gains experience, the teachers keep putting him into situations which are more difficult and unfair to his success, including having to fight two armies simultaneously. Each of the armies had the chance deploy and set up. Each time, Ender finds a way to succeed, including finding a loophole to end the game

In each of these games, Ender is having to recreate the rules, on the fly. This is no different than what teachers and students are facing in the classrooms, the fact the the rules of the game, go to school, go to college, get a good job, are changing and due to global competition, the deck may be stacked against us. Just ask recent college graduates if the rules are changing. As many of them are moving back home, unable to find that entry level job that 20 years ago was more easily found.

3. We are not growing up to our parent’s world

Like David, I also remember watching my father get dressed. I too followed a similar path through school, preparing me for a future which was like of my father. But with the turmoil and current changes in the economy, that future never materialized. Instead, jobs are more fluid. It is important to teach students to think and troubleshoot their own learning. More of us are going to be like David and many of the professional athletes that we cherish. We are going to be free agent, contract employees. Major corporations may still exist, but they are going to be filled by a fluid set of workers. We need to teach students to be entrepenuers, who will need to develop their own audience and voice in order to sell themselves. This is preparing our children for a future which was past, with individual guilds.

4. To begin to bridge the digital divide, we need to create our own learning networks

Just as we need to capture the magic of learning that toddlers and young elementary students bring every day, we need to ignite this same love of learning for our students and ourselves. It seems that by the time students reach high school, the love of learning for learning’s sake has been stomped out of their lives. When watching young people, they collaborate with each other to share their learning. They are following their own flight plans. We try to teach children the way we want to teach, rather than the way that they want to learn. I believe that we need to meet half way, but we have to make the first move.

5. The nature of information has changed

The ability to publish has changed the way that students deal with information. They are not longer fed the information by the traditional gatekeepers, teachers and librarians. They are able to access it in a variety of sources, text, audio, and video. Being literate involves being able to create a product and develop an audience for that product that separates it from the white noise of all of the similar products. We want our students efforts to rise like cream to the top.

Likewise, as teachers, we need to find a way to package our message so that it can compete for our student’s attention. They are being bombarded by other’s clamoring for their attention, tv, radio, mp3 players. How do we motivate students? We find a way to hook them, and then through the relationship created, engage them in conversation and personal discovery.

6. How do we drive learning in a flat classroom, freed from gravity?

There are three converging conditions which can become new boundaries. We are producing a Info-Savvy generation who needs us to help deal with and shape the information to fit the framework of their learning. They need guidance and scaffolding to help them deal with it. They need to make mistakes in a safe and effective environment.

These are our challenges. As we continue through the next two weeks of the K12 Conference, create connections and continue the conversation, I am hopeful that when next year when we gather for the K12 Online conference that we will be able to:

• share success stories where teachers are reshaping their classrooms and managing their students individual flight plans like a good air traffic controller, with no accidents or slow downs.
• let the students begin to create their own rules to fit the game which is rapidly changing and often to their disadvantage
• help all learners, students and adults, learn how to develop their voices using a variety of tools, so that they can develop an audience and create their own personal learning networks.

40 sessions and 3 live events to go. I know it will take me longer than the two weeks alloted for the conference. I look forward to my learning and new connections that I will make.

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Like many of you on Monday morning, I opened up my web browser and pointed it two the K12 Online Conference Blog so that I could download the Pre-Conference Keynote by David Warlick.

One of the changes in this year’s conference, which Wes Fryer notes in his blog post, Inventing New Boundaries, is the presence of both audio and video content feeds for the conference. I have now listened to Warlick’s audio feed nearly twice over and watched the video feed once last night.

Something that I have noticed is that the experiences are vastly different. The same way that I prefer listening to a baseball game on the radio rather than watching it on television (ok, I would rather be at the game), I found the experience of listening to the keynote much more profound than watching it.

In trying to determine why, I first think about the environment that I was in while listening versus watching. When watching the keynote, I was on my computer and during the presentation, I was backchanneling in David’s chat room, I was reserving my copy of Ender’s Game at the library so that I could reread it, and I was checking my email. Comparing this to the environment of my car or walking the dog over the last two evenings, I was more focused and engaged in the process. I also found that trying to process of processing the audio content while associating it with the video more difficult, especially with this keynote. It will be interesting to see if this is going to be the same for the other sessions as they are posted next week.

At times, I found the video distracting and not helpful to developing the ideas, whereas simply listening to the audio has sparked many ideas. I found that there were several outstanding kernals which I wish that David would have focused on to develop more meaning and understanding. I am still processing the the ideas that are bouncing around my brain, trying to develop make sense of it and putting onto the framework that I need to in order to be a better teacher, coach, and mentor.

I look forward to sharing my take-aways from David’s keynote. I hope to be finishing this within the next few days. Come back soon

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