Wikipedia Co-Founder Calls on Philanthropists to Help Make Textbooks Free Online

Larry Sanger co-founder of Wikipedia, posted a public appeal to philanthropists in the form of an online petition, outlining his vision of a world where textbooks cost children nothing.

Link to Article in Chronical of Higher Education.

Larnny Sanger now runs a spin-off of Wikipedia called Citizendium, which utilizes experts in writing and moderating content.

Ed Tech Advocacy News

Earlier this month, I participated in CoSN's Advocacy Day. More than 100 advocates from 26 states gathered in Washington, DC met with the congressional delegations from their respective states to promote the need for more funding for education technology programs, particularly Title IID/Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), as well as the E-Rate program. These efforts were particularly timely as Congress has just begun its FY09 Appropriations cycle.

Currently the President has zeroed out EETT funding. This is especially bad timing because of California's recent education budget crisis.

One way you can help advocate technology funding is through ETAN. ETAN makes it easy to send an email to your legislators. You just type in your zip code and it automatically sets it up for the correct legislators and sets up a draft of some of the key funding issues for Ed Tech that you can change. It helps to personalize the email and tell legislators how the funding helps your district.

You can read more about Ed Tech Policies at the Pepperdine CadreXII Policy Page.

What's New at The Stephens Group

Early registration for The Milwaukee Digital Media Conference is available at our conference web site at http://milwaukeedmc.com/ . If you register by May 1^st you can save $50 off the cost of the registration. This year’s conference will be held at the Milwaukee Public Zoo from July 28^th-31^st. This is a hands-on conference in which you will learn about wikis, digital mapping, digital photography, video-editing, and podcasting. We have also added a student strand for students grades 3-6. (Students in grade 7-12 are welcome to come with their teachers and participate in the adult strand).

Registration is also still open for The Stephens Group Using Digital Media in the Classroom Workshops on May 10^th. We are offering classes on Advanced Podcasting and Free Digital Media Tools. More information is available at our website at http://www.thestephensgroup.com/workshops.php .

Consultants will be presenting at the Wisconsin Educational Media Technology Association (WEMTA) April 6^th-8^th on Web 2.0 Tools for Information Technology Planning, Lessons Learned in the Digital Media Explosion, Video-conferencing, Data Driven Decision Making, & One-to-One Computing. Information on times and locations of sessions are available at http://www.thestephensgroup.com/conferences.php#WisconsinEducationalMediaampTechnologyAssociation

Feel free to pass this information on to others who might find this information of interest.

Lemon Grove's e-Pad

Last week I participated in CoSN's Advocacy Day in Washington D.C. CoSN sets up appointments with your staff members of you legislators so you can talk with them about the importance of funding for educational technology.

When we were in Senator Boxer's Office I met Darryl LaGrace, Chief Technology Officer from the Lemon Grove School District. Darryl was one of the speakers on ultraportables in a CoSN webcast this fall. His district worked with vendors to create their own ultraportable device for students called the e-Pad. He happened to have one with him and let me take a picture.

CoSN is a community of practice in which educational technology professionals share resources with one another. Most of this sharing happens virtually. It was fun to go to the conference and meet many of the people I've been learning from face-to-face.

Leadership, Policy & Innovation

This week I was at the Consortium of School Networking Conference (CoSN) in Virginia. The theme of this year’s conference was leadership, policy, and innovation. The presentations and conversations I had at the conference brought all of these themes in focus for me.

Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, was the closing keynote speaker for the conference. In a private reception, he talked about how in business what is valued is novelty, nuance and customization and how it is ironic that the current trend in school is that we emphasize routines, right answers and standardization. He talked about how these are the wrong things to emphasize during our new global economy. Technology is doing more and more of the left brain work we used to do. Right brain thinking is harder to replicate. The Internet has made facts ubiquitous and free therefore they don’t matter as much.

In the closing keynote he talked about the following six aptitudes needed for career success and personal satisfaction: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, and Play. These aptitudes overlapped with what was discussed on the panel discussion I moderated on ultraportable devices. The panel was made up of Leslie Wilson, from the One-to-One Institute, Gary Stager, Susan Einhorn, from the Anytime Anywhere Foundation, and Sam Farsaii from the Irving School District. One of the things that came out of the panel discussions is that these machines are not made to be smaller clones of the desktop computers we are used to. As Gary Stager said, “They are not made to run Microsoft Office, and Novell”. Instead their design is centered around making the very things that Daniel Pink was talking about possible for students on a global scale.

It is interesting that we live in a time when our economy needs students with right brain abilities yet our current policies are in conflict with this. In his article, Framing Constructivism in Practice as the Negotiation of Dilemmas: An Analysis of the Conceptual, Pedagogical, Cultural and Political Challenges Facing Teachers, Windschitl (2002) identifies three barriers that teachers have to overcome to evolve into constructivist teaching; conceptual, pedagogical and political. Conceptual barriers have to do with understanding the theory and making it personal. Pedagogical barriers have to do with designing curriculum and constructivist experiences. Political barriers have to do with what Windschitl calls “educational conservatism”. He describes the process as “negotiating for authority and support to teach for understanding” (p. 133). The pressures educators feel from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) would be a good example of political pressures that actually work against implementing constructivist theory into the classroom. In many school systems, this legislation has resulted in increased pressure to follow rigid curriculums that are designed to help students perform well on standardized tests. These types of curriculum support traditional literacies, but often leave little room for higher-order thinking, new media literacies or 21^st Century Skills, the things that laptops and ultraportables are best suited for.

Daniel Pink talked about how we need to give teachers and students more autonomy. He said, "When you give motivated teachers autonomy, extraordinary things happen".

CUE Ning Network

Last week The Stephens Group was at the Computer Using Educators Conference in Palm Springs. CUE used Ning as a social networking tool for the conference. Presenters can post their handouts to the site and conference attendees can post replies. You can see our handouts for iPods in the Classroom, Mind the Gap- Technologies to help Struggling Learners, and Leveraging Technologies for Learning on the CUE Ning site. It is our hope that the conversations started during the conference will continue beyond the conference.