Have you seen the movie "Up in the Air" which came our around Christmas Eve? If so, what do you think? I saw it on opening night when everyone else was going to Avatar or Sherlock Holmes. They missed out on what I think was one of the best movies of all time. A summary of the movie in Wikipedia is available.
On February 20, 2010, Lisa Neal Gualtieri from eLearn Magazine posted to the eLearn Magazine blog review of it. She argued that it is George Clooney's best performance. She also commented that much of what is covered in there relates to training problems. She commented on training performance issues, mentoring, training delivery formats (FTF or videoconferencing), and coping with the difference between academically taught theory and real world practices. Lisa is spot on in so many ways. Yes, this movie has much to tell corporate training folks. However, the connections I made were more related to one's life path. With some gentle nudging from Lisa, I commented on her blog post tonight (thanks Lisa!). Much of my response is below (though I expanded on it a bit here and reworked some parts).
This movie is filled with life questions that we all face. Some that we rarely, if ever, are willing to admit to. My son, Alex, and I discussed them on the way home after watching the movie. It has been 2 months since I saw the movie so remembering these issues may be difficult for me. Below are some that we discussed as well as some new ones I just thought of.
Themes or Paths in "Up in the Air":
1. "Major Career Goal(s)." He had a chance to hit the bigtime as a keynote speaker but at the last minute gave it up for love. It was his life dream and chance for a new career outside of firing people. That was, in fact, the pinnacle moment of the movie. We all have such life choices we face at some pt in our lives (some more often than others). Do we go for fame and money or love? Are career goals more important than family, personal, and emotional ones? What will you decide? What if you make the wrong decision? I mean to work and work and work for something and then to give it up for something or someone seemingly special that truly is not there. Totally blindsided by love or something new. Could something more worse ever happen to anyone? Can it? But if so, what would result to that person and his or her inner soul? What would happen to the passion and striving for something more meaningful or different in one's life? Would career types of goals forever vanish? Would the marrow really be sucked out of one's life? Where does Ryan Bingham go from here? Back on a plane I guess. Picking up another backpack of experiences. Oh that backback of his..that backpack we each carry around with us. Multicolored. Sturdy. Handy. Portable. Inclusive. Unbrakeable. Compact. Touching. It holds our identity. And our identity holds it...yes it holds it together at times by a final twisting little piece of string. Hang on "Ryan"...hang on.
2. "Family Connections." What about the reconnection with family? Being from Wisconsin originally, the VFW posts, beer pubs, wintry roads, former high schools, and little hotels in faraway places had me thinking. I remember those days ice fishing with my father on Lake Mendota in Madison as well as Lake Pewaukee nearer to home in Milwaukee and those much further to the north (and colder). I remember the dirty snow. I remember the endless beer and brandy poured out. I remember the accents (no, not Fargo-like, but close). And I remember moving away and now not wanting to live there again. It is just too cold. But will we all someday return home to celebrate who we are and find our identity in our family? What will draw us back? Will it be something accidental or purposeful? Is it destiny to return? And what happens to those who never do...who never come to grips with the fact that their current occupation is not or can never be the whole of who they are?
3. "On the Run" which some might call the theme of "Flight." Then there is the theme of leaving and being always on the run or on the go. We are flying here or there and just where "there" really is does not matter. What matters is the departure...getting on that plane. What are we departing from? Where are we arriving at? A new life for a day or 2 or a week? Some space? What happens to one's soul when there is no permanancy or place to call home except for 15 or so days of the year? Can home be up in the air? Can it be in plane? Can flying provide a sense of home? Can home be in the airport ala that movie Tom Hanks was in a few years back (The Terminal, 2004)? Can it be going through endless security checks? Just where is home for those road warriors? Is there a need for home that we all feel? Or are a select few excluded from it?
4. "Commitment." St. Louis one day. Omaha, Detroit, Las Vegas, Chicago, or Miami the next. What are people who travel so much running from? Commitment? Death? Stability? A sedentary lifestyle? Or are they trying to remain young or keep their future options open by not commiting to anything or anyone? Alternatively, might they be commiting to the world at large and trying to provide service to people spanning the far reaches of the globe instead of just those in a particular company, organization, region, community, neighborhood, or city.
5. "Love" and "Spontaneity." Love is certainly a theme. What happens when one shuts out love or emotion for years or decades and then finds it, only to have it quickly and without much warning shut on him or her? What happens next time? And can love just spring up spontaneously when on the road when one is avoiding commitments? In some ways, that word--"spontaneity"--is a theme as well. Much is preset in "Up in the Air" but so much more is happening on the "fly" or in a highly spontaneous and uncontrollable fashion. Do these two words--"love" and "spontaneity"--dance with each other throughout one's life? Do each serve in their own way to make one more creative and complete? Do they coalesce at some point to help one find his or her true volition...or, in this case, to potentially take a huge detour from it. As noted above, the paths we seek for years can come to halt when we meet what we think is our destiny in the form of a future soulmate or ideal project or new initiative. What new projects arise each month or week or day that take us away from our focus, goals, and life quests to make a difference in the world...or our slice of it anyway?
6. "Apprenticeship." Apprenticeship is a theme. One is coached and mentored by those with more experience and insights on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Such timely apprenticeship can take place face-to-face or via an assortment of technologies today (phone, text messaging, MSN, Skype, videoconferencing, etc.). Apprenticeship is all around us. A solid mentor can pull one through some rough times and send one on an accelerating trajectory. Sometimes, however, it is quite confusing to know just who is doing the mentoring and who is being mentored. The newbie at work just might have some creative insights into solutions to problems that have been perplexing management or a team leader for years. We each learn from the "green" people around us as well as those who are black and blue from all the bruising battles they have been in. Personally, I learn most lessons from people decades older and younger than me. Ryan Bingham is learning from a rich array of people around him in this movie. The more he mentors and apprentices others, the more they mentor him.
7. "Life Purpose." What is life is a theme. What is our purpose. In the movie, George Clooney (Ryan Bingham) thought it was to get up and go and never put down roots. At some point, he questions it. He thinks about that grand life choice. Seeing someone younger than him go through the emotions of a relationship definitely has him thinking. Life purpose is the big question eating away at each of us each day of our lives, and it happens whether we know it or not. This movie is one of many that put such inner life questions on display and they tug at the soul of the audience. That tugging is what raises films like this above most others.
8. "Reaching More Modest, Mid-Term, and Momentary Goals." Then there is the goal of having flown nearly 10 million miles and counting down to the ultimate day and flight. And when it happens, you are too distracted to really remember it or to focus on it. We are humans. As such, we are goal driven creatures. Goals sometimes dictate who we are and what we do...too often in fact. But after having flown so many miles each year, Ryan Bingham reaches his goal, and in a strange way, he does not care. The potential relationship and commitment overrides it. Love here once again has trumped those little goals that consume us all endlessly each day, each month, each year, without end. Teeny, tiny, little goals and narrow focuses get us through all those flights to Omaha and Las Vegas (though a few shows at night might help as well). But when one finds someone or something to finally commit to, those more modest, smaller, or mid-term goals are quickly forgotten or flow to the background of one's life. They are momentary goals and that is really all that they are. Why do we spend so many hours fretting about them? Well, perhaps we do this to give us the expression, "such is life."
9. "Change." Change is a theme. Change is a constant in the lives of everyone in the movie. Change, like the grim reaper, will creep up on you. You get fired. Move to a new address or city. Find a new job. Head to a new location. Get a different boss. Find a new lover. Learn to like a new song or dance move. Fly a different airline. Use a different rental car service. Some people cope with change better than others. Some cannot take change of any shape or form. How can such people be helped? Does firing them via videoconferencing soften the blow of losing a job? Does having a patented or preset answer to each question that may come up along the way really help someone cope such change? And what happens when several such predicaments or life stressors come in succession or waves? Do you want to simply ignore or, worse, strike out, at those with their forms, formats, and canned talk?
10. "Control." Parallel to change is the tenth theme of control. You think you control your life. But it is really the company, the economy, the pilot, the agent, the flight attendant, the neighbor, the sister, the niece, the co-worker, etc. They all have a piece of you and your life. So what do you really, ultimately control? Can you really control anything? Do you control any aspect of your life when you shut out most or all others from it? That is one way to view this film anyway. In actuality, I believe in some personal sense of control in one's life path--i.e., you can fly American (which I rarely do) or Delta/NW. Well let's hope for more personal control than that. What do you think? Do you control each step you take...each decision you seemingly make...each accomplishment you might list? Yes, personal control is a theme here all right.
These are 10 or 12 themes that I see in Up in the Air. I am sure that you will have your own themes or issues; this movie is full of them. As someone who gives 80-100 or more talks per year all over the globe, I can relate to much of it. However, I do not have any goal to reach 10 million miles anytime soon.
And for me? I go up in the air in 4 days to Oklahoma City and 4 days later to Atlanta and then Auburn, Alabama the following day. During the past few weeks, I have been to Fargo, Minneapolis, Frankfort (Kentucky), Indianapolis, Houston, Austin, etc. You can find those talks posted as color PDF documents at my TrainingShare.com site in the achived talks section. You can also find some video snippets I did for STARLINK in Dallas on their recent program on the Web 2.0 in Higher Education (which they filmed in Bloomington back in early January). They will produce another show later on this month related to motivation with technology (wherein I will make an appearance or 2 or 3 perhaps) using footage from the January filming.
For now, TravelinEdMan, is enjoying this 2 week reprieve from flying. How about you? Up in the air are you? See ya there then...see you there. And do bring along your backpack and show me a few things that you have in it. I am forever curious. I will bring my famed fishbag to show you...bought in 1994 during the AERA Conference in New Orleans, there are just a few threads holding it together.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Thursday, 28 January 2010
From iSMART to ELI to Fargo to the Gates Foundation to Sloan-C to EdNews to to AARP to Cisco Telepresence to the eLearning Guild
Travel:
Houston and Austin for iSMART and ELI: What a week or two. Last week, I was in Houston to hear about the iSMART project and then jumped on a plane to Austin for the Educause Learning Initiatives conference where I was a featured speaker. On the way back, I had a long walk across the concourse in Houston. A very long walk. And then I ended up at the wrong gate. Oh well...let's walk some mre.
Fargo: This week I was in Fargo to present at North Dakota State University. As with the movie Fargo, Monday was a nightmare flying to get there. De-iced my plane 3 times in Indy and then sat on the runway only to get to Minneapolis and first have no groundcrew to bring us to the gate and then an inoperable jetbridge. Once inside, I found out that my flight was canceled going to Fargo so I had to take a United flight to Denver and Frontier flight to Fargo. Yikes! So please do not be jealous of my traveledman ways and days. Sometimes flying sucks. This week was a case in point. But I made it. Many people from NDSU were in Minneapolis still trying the next day. I think it was 10 below without windchill Wednesday morning (yesterday) when I left.
You might ask about iSMART which I mentioned above. The “Integration of Science, Mathematics, and Reflective Teaching (iSMART) is a 2-year online graduate program for middle school science and mathematics teachers in Texas.” And it is a FREE master's degree paid for with a $3 million grant from the Texas Education Foundation. There are some press releases on this from last spring. My colleague Mimi Lee at the University of Houston is helping design some of the courses and conduct research on the program. Mimi and her colleague Dr. Jennifer Chauvot and several others are heading this up.
I had heard about iSMART some time ago and was immediately energized about the purpose and scope. So it was great to chat and consult a bit with the iSMART team last week over lunch at the Zaza Hotel in Houston near Rice University. You can read more about iSMART at the iSMART project homepage. Cool stuff! Combine the open educational resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW), and online learning movement.
The first iSMART cohort begins in the fall of 2010. They are about to begin recruiting 25 teachers for the first cohort.
Ok, that is enough on my travels. My body is still recovering from the trip to Fargo (no woodchippers encountered fortunately). Next week I go the University of Minnesota for 4 talks.
Lots of technology news this week. Yes, Apple released the iPad, but there is much other interesting news in the learning technology space this week. See below:
1. Bill Gates and Gates Foundation Committed to Online Learning: Bill Gates is blogging on the importance of online learning and going to fund more from the Gates Foundation. Mark Parry from the Chronicle of Higher Education has a short summary of this post in the Wired Campus today and tells higher ed folks to start writing grants! Some of the ideas he discusses are mentioned in my World is Open book.
In the Chronicle article, Parry highlights this quote from Bill Gates: "The foundation has made a few grants to drive online learning, but we are just at the start of this work," Gates writes. "So far, technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning." Ah, blended learning! Aha. Has he seen my Handbook of Blended Learning? Not likely.
2. Sloan-C: The Sloan Consortium just released a brand new report (January 2010) showing a 17 percent jump in online enrollments in the USA in 2009 (now up to 4.6 million college students taking at least one online class). Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2010). Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009 (Release Date: January 2010), Sloan Consortium. Interesting one. Read it! If you want the overview, the Chronicle did a nice job of that 1-2 days ago. Again, it was Marc Parry.
Some great charts and data in the Sloan-C report as always.
Here is some news where my work is recently featured or I am interviewed:
1. EducationNews: An interview on a recent print-on-demand book of mine and special journal issue came out.
January 27, 2010:
Interviewed for EdNews (http://ednews.org/), "An Interview with Curt Bonk from Indiana University, Mimi Miyoung Lee from the University of Houston, and Tom Reynolds from National University on E-Learning in Asia," by Michael Shaughnessy, January 27, 2010, EducationNews; Available: http://www.educationnews.org/michael-f-shaughnessy/34519.html
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.) (2009). A Special Passage through Asia E-Learning. Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. (see http://www.editlib.org/ebooks/ or http://www.editlib.org/p/32264 and http://aace.org)
Note: this was also a special journal issue of the International Journal of E-Learning:
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.) (2009). International Journal on E-Learning. 8(4). Special issue: A Special Passage through Asia E-Learning. http://www.editlib.org/j/IJEL/v/8/n/4
Note: EducationNews is a top online education site with millions of readers.
2. AARP Quote: I was also quoted in article for AARP Bulletin, January-February, 2010, January 1, 2010, “FreE-Learning.” by Bill Hogan, The New U: How to Learn Just About Anything Online…For Free. This is a really interesting article with many useful links in the free and open learning space (though it is somewhat basic as Stephen Downes recently pointed out).
Note: No one contacted me on this one…it just appeared.
3. GETideas.org Telepresence Interview: I was also interviewed via Cisco Telepresence for Education Thought Leaders from GETideas.org which is owned by Cisco . Apparently, it was also shown on Cisco Employee TV network; Interview with Jenny House, San Jose, CA, Topic: The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education, December 7, 2009 (posted January 2010, 32 minutes). There was a blog post in Curriki on this as well.
Note: I was in Indianapolis for this interview. The interviewer was in San Jose. This telepresence experience was cool.
4. eLearning Guild: Finally, on Monday February 15th, I will be presenting a free Webinar on my World is Open book. To attend for free, you must register. This will be for 1 hour from 1:30 to 2:30 pm EST or 10:30 to 11:30 am PST. They are using a tool called GoToWebinar.
Ok, enough news for now. My spring is loaded with such travel.
Houston and Austin for iSMART and ELI: What a week or two. Last week, I was in Houston to hear about the iSMART project and then jumped on a plane to Austin for the Educause Learning Initiatives conference where I was a featured speaker. On the way back, I had a long walk across the concourse in Houston. A very long walk. And then I ended up at the wrong gate. Oh well...let's walk some mre.
Fargo: This week I was in Fargo to present at North Dakota State University. As with the movie Fargo, Monday was a nightmare flying to get there. De-iced my plane 3 times in Indy and then sat on the runway only to get to Minneapolis and first have no groundcrew to bring us to the gate and then an inoperable jetbridge. Once inside, I found out that my flight was canceled going to Fargo so I had to take a United flight to Denver and Frontier flight to Fargo. Yikes! So please do not be jealous of my traveledman ways and days. Sometimes flying sucks. This week was a case in point. But I made it. Many people from NDSU were in Minneapolis still trying the next day. I think it was 10 below without windchill Wednesday morning (yesterday) when I left.
You might ask about iSMART which I mentioned above. The “Integration of Science, Mathematics, and Reflective Teaching (iSMART) is a 2-year online graduate program for middle school science and mathematics teachers in Texas.” And it is a FREE master's degree paid for with a $3 million grant from the Texas Education Foundation. There are some press releases on this from last spring. My colleague Mimi Lee at the University of Houston is helping design some of the courses and conduct research on the program. Mimi and her colleague Dr. Jennifer Chauvot and several others are heading this up.
I had heard about iSMART some time ago and was immediately energized about the purpose and scope. So it was great to chat and consult a bit with the iSMART team last week over lunch at the Zaza Hotel in Houston near Rice University. You can read more about iSMART at the iSMART project homepage. Cool stuff! Combine the open educational resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW), and online learning movement.
The first iSMART cohort begins in the fall of 2010. They are about to begin recruiting 25 teachers for the first cohort.
Ok, that is enough on my travels. My body is still recovering from the trip to Fargo (no woodchippers encountered fortunately). Next week I go the University of Minnesota for 4 talks.
Lots of technology news this week. Yes, Apple released the iPad, but there is much other interesting news in the learning technology space this week. See below:
1. Bill Gates and Gates Foundation Committed to Online Learning: Bill Gates is blogging on the importance of online learning and going to fund more from the Gates Foundation. Mark Parry from the Chronicle of Higher Education has a short summary of this post in the Wired Campus today and tells higher ed folks to start writing grants! Some of the ideas he discusses are mentioned in my World is Open book.
In the Chronicle article, Parry highlights this quote from Bill Gates: "The foundation has made a few grants to drive online learning, but we are just at the start of this work," Gates writes. "So far, technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning." Ah, blended learning! Aha. Has he seen my Handbook of Blended Learning? Not likely.
2. Sloan-C: The Sloan Consortium just released a brand new report (January 2010) showing a 17 percent jump in online enrollments in the USA in 2009 (now up to 4.6 million college students taking at least one online class). Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2010). Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009 (Release Date: January 2010), Sloan Consortium. Interesting one. Read it! If you want the overview, the Chronicle did a nice job of that 1-2 days ago. Again, it was Marc Parry.
Some great charts and data in the Sloan-C report as always.
Here is some news where my work is recently featured or I am interviewed:
1. EducationNews: An interview on a recent print-on-demand book of mine and special journal issue came out.
January 27, 2010:
Interviewed for EdNews (http://ednews.org/), "An Interview with Curt Bonk from Indiana University, Mimi Miyoung Lee from the University of Houston, and Tom Reynolds from National University on E-Learning in Asia," by Michael Shaughnessy, January 27, 2010, EducationNews; Available: http://www.educationnews.org/michael-f-shaughnessy/34519.html
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.) (2009). A Special Passage through Asia E-Learning. Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. (see http://www.editlib.org/ebooks/ or http://www.editlib.org/p/32264 and http://aace.org)
Note: this was also a special journal issue of the International Journal of E-Learning:
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.) (2009). International Journal on E-Learning. 8(4). Special issue: A Special Passage through Asia E-Learning. http://www.editlib.org/j/IJEL/v/8/n/4
Note: EducationNews is a top online education site with millions of readers.
2. AARP Quote: I was also quoted in article for AARP Bulletin, January-February, 2010, January 1, 2010, “FreE-Learning.” by Bill Hogan, The New U: How to Learn Just About Anything Online…For Free. This is a really interesting article with many useful links in the free and open learning space (though it is somewhat basic as Stephen Downes recently pointed out).
Note: No one contacted me on this one…it just appeared.
3. GETideas.org Telepresence Interview: I was also interviewed via Cisco Telepresence for Education Thought Leaders from GETideas.org which is owned by Cisco . Apparently, it was also shown on Cisco Employee TV network; Interview with Jenny House, San Jose, CA, Topic: The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education, December 7, 2009 (posted January 2010, 32 minutes). There was a blog post in Curriki on this as well.
Note: I was in Indianapolis for this interview. The interviewer was in San Jose. This telepresence experience was cool.
4. eLearning Guild: Finally, on Monday February 15th, I will be presenting a free Webinar on my World is Open book. To attend for free, you must register. This will be for 1 hour from 1:30 to 2:30 pm EST or 10:30 to 11:30 am PST. They are using a tool called GoToWebinar.
Ok, enough news for now. My spring is loaded with such travel.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Sharing . . . the Journey: A Prequel to "The World Is Open"
I couple of months ago, I rewrote the short prequel to my book, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education.
Sharing . . . the Journey: A Prequel to The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
Here is the Citation to the prequal:
Bonk, C. J. (2009). Sharing…the journey: A Prequel to “The World is Open: Now WE-ALL-LEARN with Web Technology.” Updated and available: http://worldisopen.com/misc/prequel.pdf
In the article, I detail the evolution of the sharing culture in education over the past few decades. I also discuss sharing from the perspetive of different generations of learning technology. A snippet from the end of that article is below. It includes 10 ways in which you can now share. Enjoy.
JOINING THE SHARING REVOLUTION
It does not matter where I travel or with whom I communicate now, the stories I hear are much different and, at times, exceedingly optimistic. The seeds of sharing have successfully grown and ripened into assorted educational fruits. No longer are there mass protest rallies against online learning or the sharing of such resources and learning. Visits to various cities in Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Korea, and Canada since the end of 2006 confirmed this for me. At each stop, people asked me if it was acceptable to videostream my talks. In response, I quickly told them to podcast, videostream, Webcast, pubcast, or do whatever they wanted with it. And feel free to post my slides, my talk abstract, picture, or bio as well. All education should be shared. The more we share educational resources, the more the knowledge of this planet is opened to its learners.
So what can you share to help education around the world?
1. Mentoring: You can sign up to be an online mentor, coach, or tutor in your area of expertise. Many professional organizations today include some type of mentoring services, including engineering, teaching, business, and nursing.
2. Course Content: If in postsecondary education, you can share instructional content you have created in places such as MERLOT.org or Connexions. If in K–12 education, perhaps contribute to or use Curriki or one of many online lesson plan sharing sites. Those in corporate, nonprofit, or government positions should talk to your training directors or chief learning officers about what sharing is possible within your organization. And informal learners and citizens of the world can create a course homepage or shell, podcast, or online instructional videos wherein they share educational ideas and experiences.
3. Join the OCW Movement: At an organizational or institu-tional level, you can share entire courses or programs in the OCW movement. Administrators need to consider putting forth proposals and strategic plans for such.
4. Guest Expert: You can be a guest expert in an online chat or Webinar. You might also podcast a lecture on a topic and place it on the Web for others to access for free, such as in iTunes. Along these same lines, you might videostream a lecture you give in a class, at a conference, or in a workshop for free distribution to the world community.
5. Collaboration: You can sign up at ePals or Keypals to engage in online collaboration with another school. You might also share cultural artifacts or lessons for such collaborative activities and events. At the corporate level, you can share software problems and solutions, new product training, and additional intellectual capital in wikis, blogs, podcasts, or other appropriate technological outlets.
6. Translator: You might volunteer to translate open educa-tional resources or OpenCourseWare in your native tongue.
7. Portals: You can create, index, or aggregate educational portals of online content. You can also market or showcase any new or consistently useful portals that you find.
8. Evaluator: You can help in the evaluation or rating of online content. You might also develop the methods and forms of evaluation to be employed.
9. Software Developer: Software developers can offer open source or introductory free versions of their software or special discounts for education.
10. Blogger: You can blog on current events in education, thereby sharing what is happening. At the same time, you can add hyperlinks within your blog, thereby stretching your post to other valuable educational resources, documents, trends, and events.
The list above is only a fraction of what is now possible. Clearly, opportunities for sharing our educational lives are exploding. This is a key part of the giving that Bill Clinton was talking about (in his book on "Giving"). Sharing education is among the most powerful acts of giving that human beings can engage in. And such educational sharing can take place in a wide variety of formats.
Sharing can be casual among friends who teach the same course and want to benefit from what each other has developed or accomplished. Such collegial sharing might involve a new instructional activity to test out, or a video you’ve just found in YouTube, CNN Video, or the BBC News and Videos. Each instance of sharing among these friends and colleagues, casual as it might be, allows for innovations, changes, and new ideas to be piloted and perhaps someday flourish in other disciplines not originally intended. Sure, instructors have always shared their resources with friends, but not at the speed or intensity possible today. Though some share educational ideas using e-mail, text messaging, and comments to online discussion forums or communities, many others now prefer their sharing to be conducted in social networking sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter. Still others employ free online phone services such as Skype and Google Talk.
Such sharing is often creative, spontaneous, and somewhat haphazard. As a result, it is virtually untrackable. But as evidenced by the millions of visits to these sites each day, it is happening! Sharing can also be more formally designed and documented in popular news media as in the OCW sites, or in the translations into additional languages as in the OOPS project. What institutional leaders and politicians need to figure out is how to foster and encourage both formal and informal sharing pursuits. How can they perhaps nudge them along, embed recognition for them, and celebrate their successes?
The scope of online sharing certainly varies. It can occur among just a few individuals or perhaps benefit only a single person for it to have value. At the same time, it can be used by teams, schools, local communities, countries, regions, or the world community. Sharing can be sensed in a fleeting moment in time and then dissipate. It can also be much more lasting and even viral, thereby spreading to people far beyond the originally intended audience and recurring a million times over.
The fourth generation of educational technologies has not only made sharing possible, but also highly encouraged. For millions of people spread far and wide across this lovely planet, these technologies are indispensable; this is how countless individuals today spend the learning-related aspects of their lives. Consequently, stories of sharing in education will be part of teaching and learning lore for decades to come. Teachers will continue to be givers, but everyone involved in education or training, no matter the role or capacity, will be sharers as well as sharing receivers.
There are no shortages of sharing opportunities today, nor will there be in ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now. With each passing generation, sharing will become increasingly synonymous with education, because sharing, like giving, is at the forefront of what it means to be human. Each person walking this planet will be expected to share his or her ideas, talents, expertise, wisdom, products, computing power, bandwidth, scientific discoveries, and educational materials with others using various forms of online technologies. Such is life in the twenty-first century and beyond.
As in Bill Clinton’s documentation of how giving can change the world, through sharing, anyone can make a small dent in solving educational problems and implementing progressive educational reforms. What will you share and where might your journeys in this exciting arena lead? I hope you find time to share your results.
Please let me know what transpires. I look forward to hearing about your innovative sharing pursuits.
Curtis J. Bonk
Sharing . . . the Journey: A Prequel to The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
Here is the Citation to the prequal:
Bonk, C. J. (2009). Sharing…the journey: A Prequel to “The World is Open: Now WE-ALL-LEARN with Web Technology.” Updated and available: http://worldisopen.com/misc/prequel.pdf
In the article, I detail the evolution of the sharing culture in education over the past few decades. I also discuss sharing from the perspetive of different generations of learning technology. A snippet from the end of that article is below. It includes 10 ways in which you can now share. Enjoy.
JOINING THE SHARING REVOLUTION
It does not matter where I travel or with whom I communicate now, the stories I hear are much different and, at times, exceedingly optimistic. The seeds of sharing have successfully grown and ripened into assorted educational fruits. No longer are there mass protest rallies against online learning or the sharing of such resources and learning. Visits to various cities in Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Korea, and Canada since the end of 2006 confirmed this for me. At each stop, people asked me if it was acceptable to videostream my talks. In response, I quickly told them to podcast, videostream, Webcast, pubcast, or do whatever they wanted with it. And feel free to post my slides, my talk abstract, picture, or bio as well. All education should be shared. The more we share educational resources, the more the knowledge of this planet is opened to its learners.
So what can you share to help education around the world?
1. Mentoring: You can sign up to be an online mentor, coach, or tutor in your area of expertise. Many professional organizations today include some type of mentoring services, including engineering, teaching, business, and nursing.
2. Course Content: If in postsecondary education, you can share instructional content you have created in places such as MERLOT.org or Connexions. If in K–12 education, perhaps contribute to or use Curriki or one of many online lesson plan sharing sites. Those in corporate, nonprofit, or government positions should talk to your training directors or chief learning officers about what sharing is possible within your organization. And informal learners and citizens of the world can create a course homepage or shell, podcast, or online instructional videos wherein they share educational ideas and experiences.
3. Join the OCW Movement: At an organizational or institu-tional level, you can share entire courses or programs in the OCW movement. Administrators need to consider putting forth proposals and strategic plans for such.
4. Guest Expert: You can be a guest expert in an online chat or Webinar. You might also podcast a lecture on a topic and place it on the Web for others to access for free, such as in iTunes. Along these same lines, you might videostream a lecture you give in a class, at a conference, or in a workshop for free distribution to the world community.
5. Collaboration: You can sign up at ePals or Keypals to engage in online collaboration with another school. You might also share cultural artifacts or lessons for such collaborative activities and events. At the corporate level, you can share software problems and solutions, new product training, and additional intellectual capital in wikis, blogs, podcasts, or other appropriate technological outlets.
6. Translator: You might volunteer to translate open educa-tional resources or OpenCourseWare in your native tongue.
7. Portals: You can create, index, or aggregate educational portals of online content. You can also market or showcase any new or consistently useful portals that you find.
8. Evaluator: You can help in the evaluation or rating of online content. You might also develop the methods and forms of evaluation to be employed.
9. Software Developer: Software developers can offer open source or introductory free versions of their software or special discounts for education.
10. Blogger: You can blog on current events in education, thereby sharing what is happening. At the same time, you can add hyperlinks within your blog, thereby stretching your post to other valuable educational resources, documents, trends, and events.
The list above is only a fraction of what is now possible. Clearly, opportunities for sharing our educational lives are exploding. This is a key part of the giving that Bill Clinton was talking about (in his book on "Giving"). Sharing education is among the most powerful acts of giving that human beings can engage in. And such educational sharing can take place in a wide variety of formats.
Sharing can be casual among friends who teach the same course and want to benefit from what each other has developed or accomplished. Such collegial sharing might involve a new instructional activity to test out, or a video you’ve just found in YouTube, CNN Video, or the BBC News and Videos. Each instance of sharing among these friends and colleagues, casual as it might be, allows for innovations, changes, and new ideas to be piloted and perhaps someday flourish in other disciplines not originally intended. Sure, instructors have always shared their resources with friends, but not at the speed or intensity possible today. Though some share educational ideas using e-mail, text messaging, and comments to online discussion forums or communities, many others now prefer their sharing to be conducted in social networking sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter. Still others employ free online phone services such as Skype and Google Talk.
Such sharing is often creative, spontaneous, and somewhat haphazard. As a result, it is virtually untrackable. But as evidenced by the millions of visits to these sites each day, it is happening! Sharing can also be more formally designed and documented in popular news media as in the OCW sites, or in the translations into additional languages as in the OOPS project. What institutional leaders and politicians need to figure out is how to foster and encourage both formal and informal sharing pursuits. How can they perhaps nudge them along, embed recognition for them, and celebrate their successes?
The scope of online sharing certainly varies. It can occur among just a few individuals or perhaps benefit only a single person for it to have value. At the same time, it can be used by teams, schools, local communities, countries, regions, or the world community. Sharing can be sensed in a fleeting moment in time and then dissipate. It can also be much more lasting and even viral, thereby spreading to people far beyond the originally intended audience and recurring a million times over.
The fourth generation of educational technologies has not only made sharing possible, but also highly encouraged. For millions of people spread far and wide across this lovely planet, these technologies are indispensable; this is how countless individuals today spend the learning-related aspects of their lives. Consequently, stories of sharing in education will be part of teaching and learning lore for decades to come. Teachers will continue to be givers, but everyone involved in education or training, no matter the role or capacity, will be sharers as well as sharing receivers.
There are no shortages of sharing opportunities today, nor will there be in ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now. With each passing generation, sharing will become increasingly synonymous with education, because sharing, like giving, is at the forefront of what it means to be human. Each person walking this planet will be expected to share his or her ideas, talents, expertise, wisdom, products, computing power, bandwidth, scientific discoveries, and educational materials with others using various forms of online technologies. Such is life in the twenty-first century and beyond.
As in Bill Clinton’s documentation of how giving can change the world, through sharing, anyone can make a small dent in solving educational problems and implementing progressive educational reforms. What will you share and where might your journeys in this exciting arena lead? I hope you find time to share your results.
Please let me know what transpires. I look forward to hearing about your innovative sharing pursuits.
Curtis J. Bonk
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Overcoming the Technology Resistance Movement: 10 Ideas
Over the past decade, we all have heard technology resistance stories. Some might say reticence, reluctance, or hesitancy (sorry this last one is not an "r" word; though we could add "restrained" and "reserved" to the list...smile). Ok, in any event, K-12 teachers, college instructors, corporate trainers, and so on all feel some tug on them to be cautious or to be a tad resistant to new technology integration ideas or shifting their teaching from face-to-face settings to fully online and blended ones.
Of course, change is hard. Even harder is keeping up with possible changes in front of us or to our sides. Frustration often sets in quickly when one does try to keep up. So resistance is often a natural barrier to said frustrations. Before I proceed any further, let me point out that such feelings of resistance have significantly dropped in the past year or two. I notice this almost everywhere i visit. I think we have moved from the technology awareness (Stage 1) and technology resistance (Stage 2) stages or phases to Technology Understanding (Stage 3) and Technology Use (Stage 4). These are the stages as I see them with Technology Application Sharing and Marketing (Stage 5) and Technology Discussion, Reflection, and Revamping (Stage 6) and so on to come later. I just made some of this up so please do not use it for training just yet...unless you want.
I get the question about faculty resistance so often after speaking about it that I wrote a chapter about how to deal with it in my 2008 book, Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing...also called the "R2D2" book. Here is the reference for the R2D2 book:
Bonk, C. J., & Zhang, K. (2008). Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Well, as with many things I do, I wrote too much. So, the publisher decided that it was one of the six chapters that needed to be deleted. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, it is the most popular of "the missing chapters." Seems everywhere I go to speak, those in the audience ultimately ask about administrators, staff, and instructors who are more hesitant and what do to about them. When I get home, I send them the missing chapter titles "Overcoming the Technology Resistant Movement."
I tell them that if you want a copy of it, send me a note at "curt at worldisopen.com." You can do so as well. Or, now you can get the shortened version that came out 1-2 days ago in the "Inside the School" newsletter from Magna Publications in Madison, Wisconsin. This article was posted in conjunction with a Webinar I will do for them in a few days (to be honest, the Webinar was taped last month when I visited Madison). Here is the online newletter article citation.
Bonk, C. J. (2010, January 11). Overcoming the Technology Resistance Movement, Inside the School (http://www.insidetheschool.com/), Magna Publications, Madison, WI. Available: http://www.insidetheschool.com/articles/overcoming-the-technology-resistance-movement/
Read the 10 ideas in there (e.g., modeling, mentoring, training, sharing, celebrating, etc.) and see what you think. Please note that I was limited to length. It is around 1,100-1,200 words I think. If you have more suggestions, place a comment with them. I have more ideas as well. Keep in mind that Inside the School is for K-12 educational personnel. However, this was originally written with college instructors and corporate trainers in mind as well as K-12 teachers. Hence, the list can be reused and repackaged in many ways and perhaps serve as starter text for a conversation with instructors or instructional designers about technology resistance or hesistancy. Hope you enjoy it.
It is nothing that special but people seem to enjoy having such a list of options to change the culture. There is no one solution. It is a systemic or cultural initiative that needs to take place for true change and progress forward. And on we will most certainly go...hopefully forward. Again, if you want the entire chapter we wrote, just let me know. It will make it in one of my next books.
Of course, change is hard. Even harder is keeping up with possible changes in front of us or to our sides. Frustration often sets in quickly when one does try to keep up. So resistance is often a natural barrier to said frustrations. Before I proceed any further, let me point out that such feelings of resistance have significantly dropped in the past year or two. I notice this almost everywhere i visit. I think we have moved from the technology awareness (Stage 1) and technology resistance (Stage 2) stages or phases to Technology Understanding (Stage 3) and Technology Use (Stage 4). These are the stages as I see them with Technology Application Sharing and Marketing (Stage 5) and Technology Discussion, Reflection, and Revamping (Stage 6) and so on to come later. I just made some of this up so please do not use it for training just yet...unless you want.
I get the question about faculty resistance so often after speaking about it that I wrote a chapter about how to deal with it in my 2008 book, Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing...also called the "R2D2" book. Here is the reference for the R2D2 book:
Bonk, C. J., & Zhang, K. (2008). Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Well, as with many things I do, I wrote too much. So, the publisher decided that it was one of the six chapters that needed to be deleted. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, it is the most popular of "the missing chapters." Seems everywhere I go to speak, those in the audience ultimately ask about administrators, staff, and instructors who are more hesitant and what do to about them. When I get home, I send them the missing chapter titles "Overcoming the Technology Resistant Movement."
I tell them that if you want a copy of it, send me a note at "curt at worldisopen.com." You can do so as well. Or, now you can get the shortened version that came out 1-2 days ago in the "Inside the School" newsletter from Magna Publications in Madison, Wisconsin. This article was posted in conjunction with a Webinar I will do for them in a few days (to be honest, the Webinar was taped last month when I visited Madison). Here is the online newletter article citation.
Bonk, C. J. (2010, January 11). Overcoming the Technology Resistance Movement, Inside the School (http://www.insidetheschool.com/), Magna Publications, Madison, WI. Available: http://www.insidetheschool.com/articles/overcoming-the-technology-resistance-movement/
Read the 10 ideas in there (e.g., modeling, mentoring, training, sharing, celebrating, etc.) and see what you think. Please note that I was limited to length. It is around 1,100-1,200 words I think. If you have more suggestions, place a comment with them. I have more ideas as well. Keep in mind that Inside the School is for K-12 educational personnel. However, this was originally written with college instructors and corporate trainers in mind as well as K-12 teachers. Hence, the list can be reused and repackaged in many ways and perhaps serve as starter text for a conversation with instructors or instructional designers about technology resistance or hesistancy. Hope you enjoy it.
It is nothing that special but people seem to enjoy having such a list of options to change the culture. There is no one solution. It is a systemic or cultural initiative that needs to take place for true change and progress forward. And on we will most certainly go...hopefully forward. Again, if you want the entire chapter we wrote, just let me know. It will make it in one of my next books.
Monday, 21 December 2009
SCoPE event on World is Open book in Elluminate later today...
What's the SCoPE?: SCoPE people (namely, my friend, Sylvia Currie over in British Columbia) is hosting an Elluminate event on my World is Open book today. According their Facebook account, "SCoPE brings together individuals who share an interest in educational research and practice and offers opportunities for dialogue across disciplines, geographical borders, professions, levels of expertise, and educational sectors." What a wonderful mission statement. This is exactly what we need in education--borderless interaction among the educators and caring citizens of this planet. But this is exactly the type of thing that Sylvia is great at.
I met Sylvia, Cindy Xin, Brian Fisher, and many other fantastic people at Simon Fraser back in November of 1998 when I was on a sabbatical. I miss them all. At the time, they were working for the TeleLearning Centres of Excellence which was headquartered at Simon Fraser University under the direction of Dr. Linda Harasim. As a side note, I often tell my students that Linda was "Queen of Online Learning"--an early adopter with many books on e-learning--so it was great to be there and learn from them all. At the time, Sylvia was running the Global Educators Network (GEN). GEN brought in a different expert or set of experts on a topic related to using technology in teaching and learning. It was a fabulous idea that had a wide following. It ran wonderfully for a few years but I think lost some funding. So now SCoPE is sorta version #2 of GEN. And, like GEN, attendance at SCoPE Webinars, forums, and what-nots is free.
I cannot think of many organizations as important as SCoPE. With millions of teachers around the world and more than a billion people now connected to the Internet in some fashion, you would think that organizations like GEN and SCoPE would be in high demand and have thousands of weekly viewers or millions of readers. These forums can serve as both an educational opportunity as well as chance to network and share stories and best practices. But, while it is not large, SCoPE, and organizations like it, serve a vital role in progressive education; especially that related to learning technology. SCoPE is one of thousands of such entities which is providing the push we need for change. Each one does not need thousands of members--just a few people and their networks can impact countless others.
SCoPE Web Event Today: The event in SCoPE later today will be held at 5 pm today EST or 2 pm Pacific. More information on the event is also posted to Facebook. You can look up the time in the World Clock link from that homepage. Or you can go directly to Elluminate: http://tinyurl.com/9m668l
Sylvia also recently blog posted on the event and my World is Open book on her Webbed Feat blog. As I said, she is highly creative.
Hope to see you there. There will be a short presentation followed by questions and I hope a few answers. Sorry for the late post on this but I am having computer problems lately and so I am now forced to use one of my laptops that I normally do not use for Elluminate meetings. Fortunatley, it is working great! I think I will use it more often. Even better news is that my hard disk that crashed is not as bad as expected--data recovery center people in Louisville said that they can get it all using Level 1 data retrieval procedures which will not be that costly. Cool!
I met Sylvia, Cindy Xin, Brian Fisher, and many other fantastic people at Simon Fraser back in November of 1998 when I was on a sabbatical. I miss them all. At the time, they were working for the TeleLearning Centres of Excellence which was headquartered at Simon Fraser University under the direction of Dr. Linda Harasim. As a side note, I often tell my students that Linda was "Queen of Online Learning"--an early adopter with many books on e-learning--so it was great to be there and learn from them all. At the time, Sylvia was running the Global Educators Network (GEN). GEN brought in a different expert or set of experts on a topic related to using technology in teaching and learning. It was a fabulous idea that had a wide following. It ran wonderfully for a few years but I think lost some funding. So now SCoPE is sorta version #2 of GEN. And, like GEN, attendance at SCoPE Webinars, forums, and what-nots is free.
I cannot think of many organizations as important as SCoPE. With millions of teachers around the world and more than a billion people now connected to the Internet in some fashion, you would think that organizations like GEN and SCoPE would be in high demand and have thousands of weekly viewers or millions of readers. These forums can serve as both an educational opportunity as well as chance to network and share stories and best practices. But, while it is not large, SCoPE, and organizations like it, serve a vital role in progressive education; especially that related to learning technology. SCoPE is one of thousands of such entities which is providing the push we need for change. Each one does not need thousands of members--just a few people and their networks can impact countless others.
SCoPE Web Event Today: The event in SCoPE later today will be held at 5 pm today EST or 2 pm Pacific. More information on the event is also posted to Facebook. You can look up the time in the World Clock link from that homepage. Or you can go directly to Elluminate: http://tinyurl.com/9m668l
Sylvia also recently blog posted on the event and my World is Open book on her Webbed Feat blog. As I said, she is highly creative.
Hope to see you there. There will be a short presentation followed by questions and I hope a few answers. Sorry for the late post on this but I am having computer problems lately and so I am now forced to use one of my laptops that I normally do not use for Elluminate meetings. Fortunatley, it is working great! I think I will use it more often. Even better news is that my hard disk that crashed is not as bad as expected--data recovery center people in Louisville said that they can get it all using Level 1 data retrieval procedures which will not be that costly. Cool!
Friday, 11 December 2009
eCampus News: R2D2: A model for using technology in education
What a wild and wacky week. Hard disk failure on my main machine. And of course I forgot to back it up for 16 months. It is now safely (I hope) tucked away at a data recovery center in Louisville. This has all my work for more than a year, so it is a stressful time. Fortunately, I have all my talks on a laptop computer and a few other things on my other laptop. Still, it is a lot of work that is potentially lost. Boot recovery errors and blue screens of death are not pleasant things to see on a Sunday afternoon.
That was not all. My back-up server died during the past week as well. My car is also having serious problems and may not last too long. The worse news came yesterday when my brother called to tell me that my mom had minor stroke. I am headed up to Milwaukee tomorrow morning on Midwest Express on what was to be a birthday party for her. Not to be. She is in West Allis Memorial Hospital (on the grounds of what used to be the field my friends and I played baseball and football on when growing up). So I guess I will see her there.
I will head to Madison Monday for a couple of Webinars for Inside the School which is owned by Magna Publications; one of which will be on blended learning during the swine flu. This will be a live session in the afternoon from 3:15 to 4:30 central time. I will do a taped show to be broadcast in February 22nd, 2010 on my Perfect e-Storm talk.
In addition to packing for Wisconsin, I am grading papers this week. Yuck. And I am revising my course syllabi for spring. Yuck. Yuck. And when I get back, I need to do my annual productivity report. Triple yuck waste of time. People wonder where faculty members spend their holiday break. I can tell you it is in front of the computer. I will do one course online related to my World is Open book and the other on instructional strategies using videoconferencing from Bloomington to Indianapolis.
Well some good news just came to me. Invites came this week to speak in Vienna, West Virginia January 7th, Auburn University March 12th, St. Johns in Newfoundland on October 15th (I have never been there!), and perhaps the Desire2Learn conference in Chicago in mid July. The recession is over for those of us who are keynote speakers. I will also be in Houston and Austin January 18-21, Fargo, North Dakota January 26th, University of Minnesota February 2nd, Houston and Austin February 16-19, Oklahoma City March 8-9, Atlanta March 11, IUPUI March 26, San Francisco for ISPI April 19-21, Denver for AERA April 30-March 3 or 4. Malaysia for Global Learn May 17-20 and Korea before and after that. There is more but I will stop there. Suffice to say, there will be many speaking venues in 2010.
More good news...Dennis Carter at eCampus News (part of eSchool News) said my article on my Read, Reflect, Display, and Do (R2D2) model is their top news story day. Some of you may recognize this as my Empowering Online Learning book with 100+ activities in it. It was great to hear that. I have been writing many such types of brief articles this fall. My fingers are getting sore.
The title of the article at eCampus News is: R2D2: A model for using technology in education. Hope you enjoy it. If you read it, be sure to go to the 3rd and 4th pages which include a bunch of web links to illustate Web technologies and resources addressing different phases of the R2D2 model. Please note that they did not include the main figure that I had included in the article related to the model.
Sometime later one, I may write another piece for eCampus News on my World is Open book. First I need to check on my mom and get my syllabi ready.
That was not all. My back-up server died during the past week as well. My car is also having serious problems and may not last too long. The worse news came yesterday when my brother called to tell me that my mom had minor stroke. I am headed up to Milwaukee tomorrow morning on Midwest Express on what was to be a birthday party for her. Not to be. She is in West Allis Memorial Hospital (on the grounds of what used to be the field my friends and I played baseball and football on when growing up). So I guess I will see her there.
I will head to Madison Monday for a couple of Webinars for Inside the School which is owned by Magna Publications; one of which will be on blended learning during the swine flu. This will be a live session in the afternoon from 3:15 to 4:30 central time. I will do a taped show to be broadcast in February 22nd, 2010 on my Perfect e-Storm talk.
In addition to packing for Wisconsin, I am grading papers this week. Yuck. And I am revising my course syllabi for spring. Yuck. Yuck. And when I get back, I need to do my annual productivity report. Triple yuck waste of time. People wonder where faculty members spend their holiday break. I can tell you it is in front of the computer. I will do one course online related to my World is Open book and the other on instructional strategies using videoconferencing from Bloomington to Indianapolis.
Well some good news just came to me. Invites came this week to speak in Vienna, West Virginia January 7th, Auburn University March 12th, St. Johns in Newfoundland on October 15th (I have never been there!), and perhaps the Desire2Learn conference in Chicago in mid July. The recession is over for those of us who are keynote speakers. I will also be in Houston and Austin January 18-21, Fargo, North Dakota January 26th, University of Minnesota February 2nd, Houston and Austin February 16-19, Oklahoma City March 8-9, Atlanta March 11, IUPUI March 26, San Francisco for ISPI April 19-21, Denver for AERA April 30-March 3 or 4. Malaysia for Global Learn May 17-20 and Korea before and after that. There is more but I will stop there. Suffice to say, there will be many speaking venues in 2010.
More good news...Dennis Carter at eCampus News (part of eSchool News) said my article on my Read, Reflect, Display, and Do (R2D2) model is their top news story day. Some of you may recognize this as my Empowering Online Learning book with 100+ activities in it. It was great to hear that. I have been writing many such types of brief articles this fall. My fingers are getting sore.
The title of the article at eCampus News is: R2D2: A model for using technology in education. Hope you enjoy it. If you read it, be sure to go to the 3rd and 4th pages which include a bunch of web links to illustate Web technologies and resources addressing different phases of the R2D2 model. Please note that they did not include the main figure that I had included in the article related to the model.
Sometime later one, I may write another piece for eCampus News on my World is Open book. First I need to check on my mom and get my syllabi ready.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Open Interview Tonight December 3rd with Steve Hargadon on "The World is Open" Book
Well, looks like 8 pm EST tonight (Thursday), Steve Hargadon will interview me about my "The World Is Open" book for 30 minutes with 15-30 minutes of Q&A to follow. To join in, click here: Elluminate.
According to Steve, "The Elluminate 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 Elluminate, please visit support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event."
Steve has quite a line-up this year: James Paul Gee, Daniel Pink, Tim Magner, David Thornburg, Dennis Littky on Big Picture Schools, Patti Schank, Howard Rheingold, Allan Collins, Larry Cuban, Danah Boyd, John Seely Brown, Maya Frost, Chris Dede, and there were some Flat Classrooms connections to talks of Don Tapscott and Thomas Friedman. As an aside, the Flat Classrooms project is from my friends, Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. This fall their Flat Classrooms project is analyzing my World is Open book. I did a short and fun (and fast and furious) YouTube video of the entire 170,000 word book for them in like 8 or 9 minutes a couple of months ago. Last month Don Tapscott and I did a couple of videos for the Flat Classrooms project as well (see Part 1 and Part 2). They featured his Grown Up Digital book last year.
When I look at the line-up Steve has assembled for his Future of Education Webinars, all I can say is wow! I am honored to be asked. It is interesting how the Web can connect someone like Steve (and all the people who listen in to his shows) to so many talented people around the planet. Anyone can now teach anything to anyone else at any time.
More information on tonight is available at his website. Hope you can attend tonight and enjoy it or view the archive.
According to Steve, "The Elluminate 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 Elluminate, please visit support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event."
Steve has quite a line-up this year: James Paul Gee, Daniel Pink, Tim Magner, David Thornburg, Dennis Littky on Big Picture Schools, Patti Schank, Howard Rheingold, Allan Collins, Larry Cuban, Danah Boyd, John Seely Brown, Maya Frost, Chris Dede, and there were some Flat Classrooms connections to talks of Don Tapscott and Thomas Friedman. As an aside, the Flat Classrooms project is from my friends, Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. This fall their Flat Classrooms project is analyzing my World is Open book. I did a short and fun (and fast and furious) YouTube video of the entire 170,000 word book for them in like 8 or 9 minutes a couple of months ago. Last month Don Tapscott and I did a couple of videos for the Flat Classrooms project as well (see Part 1 and Part 2). They featured his Grown Up Digital book last year.
When I look at the line-up Steve has assembled for his Future of Education Webinars, all I can say is wow! I am honored to be asked. It is interesting how the Web can connect someone like Steve (and all the people who listen in to his shows) to so many talented people around the planet. Anyone can now teach anything to anyone else at any time.
More information on tonight is available at his website. Hope you can attend tonight and enjoy it or view the archive.
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