Stephens Group Words for 2008

I recently added a cloud tag to my blog. It was interesting to reflect on which words I tagged most often in 2008.

21st Century Skills-- This year we added a new belief statements to our mission statement, "We believe all students need to graduate with 21st Century Skills". All of our professional development efforts have been aligned to support this belief statement.

MDMC2008- - MDMC stands for the Milwaukee Digital Media Conference. This year's conference was a huge success. We had 120 educators collaboratively work with us on real world digital media projects at the Milwaukee County Zoo. You can read more about the conference in an article published by The Milwaukee Journal.

One-to-One Computing- - This year The Stephens Group started a new division of our company on One-to-One Computing with four consultants who have experience working with one-to-one computing programs. We started a free social networking site around this topic and currently has 37 members from all over the country. One-to-one computing was also the topic of my comps paper and will be my dissertation topic too- so I'm sure it will be tagged a lot more in 2009.

PODetc-
PODetc is also a new division of our company. It stands for Professional Online Development for the Educational Technology Community. The online relationships that have been developed are truly amazing. We have had teachers and administrators from all over the world in K-12 and higher ed take our courses. On Monday we start our fourth session of graduate courses for educators. We currently have five courses aligned to the new ISTE NETS Standards for teachers.

Social Networking & Twitter- - As Tammy Lind, our director of professional development stated recently, "I have learned more from people on Twitter this past year than all of my professional development including my master's degree combined". Consultants need to be constantly learning. Social networking tools such as Twitter and CollectiveX have helped us reach out to our clients, share information with one another, get just-in-time support and brought us closer together. I'm sure we will be leveraging these tools even more in 2009 as we broaden our personal learning networks.

Ultraportable Devices- This year through an internship with CoSN I had the opportunity to work on a report on ultraportable devices. I have become really interested in this topic as it also related to my dissertation. In my consulting work, I have been surprised that school districts have been somewhat reluctant to go this route with their hardware purchases. If we are really serious about providing student centered learning experiences, I think these devices have huge potential for changing the teaching and learning process.

San Jose Digital Media Course- This year we held a course at the San Jose Museum of Art to create vodcasts (or video-podcasts) using a method of inquiry that can be used in any discipline. We will be holding the course again June 22nd-29th. More information is available on our course wiki.

Wiki- 2008 was definitely the year of the wiki for The Stephens Group. The Stephens Group has seven wikis. Some are internal for consultants to share information and collaborate. Others such as our Information Technology Planning Wiki are to share information with clients. We use this one a lot with our clients as a means of sharing research and best practices when developing strategic information technology plans. Our biggest wiki, however is the wiki we created for this year's digital media conference. Educators worked in teams to create multimedia wikis around exhibits at the zoo. We are very proud of their work! You can view their wikis at http://mdmc2008.wikispaces.com/Directory.

It comes as no surprise that the most tagged word in 2008 was Web 2.0. Many of the technologies we are using as a company have not changed from 2007. However, what is changing is how we use them. Our company has consultants and clients in multiple states. Web 2.0 tools has really allowed us to work more efficiently and seamlessly across multiple timezones.

I'm looking forward to seeing what new words get tagged in 2009!

Final Project

This week five teachers gathered at the San Jose Museum of Art for a week long investigation of art and the art of questioning. Visual Thinking Skills were used to explore the robot exhibit. Visual Thinking Skills were used to explore the robot exhibit. Teachers questioned and learned together, sharing knowledge and using technology to address reflective learning. The teachers furthered their understanding of 21st Century Skills that are vital to the success of our students. The robots served as a constant reminder of our current technological age and a platform for the VTS questioning strategies that promote analytical thinking. A vodcast, learning, and a robot were built.

Learning to Look

Today we worked two dimensionally. Yesterday we worked on experiencing VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) with San Jose Museum docent Michael Arellano. Today we tried to be practitioners of VTS by trying to create that experience for the audiences of our vodcasts. As educators it was hard. We come from a culture where teachers are the experts and our natural behavior is to want to tell people about our interpretations instead of lead them through an inquiry process to discover it on their own. Lucy Larson from the San Jose Museum staff critiqued our script in the afternoon. She helped us back up the lens even more to provide an even better experience for our audience to look and discover. This will really help us help our audience to develop their visual literacy skills.

Robots!

This week we started the San Jose Digital Media Course at the San Jose Museum. We are creating a vodcast on the use of robots in art. You can learn more about the course on our course wiki. The picture on the right comes from part of Twin Palms Rest in Peace.

The Power of Questioning

Writing a script is not a linear process. For example, Rachelle Doorley the Interim Director of Education at the San Jose Museum of Art was telling me that in a recent podcast that they did a free-lance writer wrote the initial script. She reviewed the script and made changes. Then she sent the script to a colleague in the education department who sent it back with changes. Then they sent it to the curator of the exhibit for feedback. Then the person who was doing the voice-overs had some questions which led to more revisions. In total the script went through five major revisions.

Rachelle went over our script and gave us some very helpful feedback. First of all the script was too long. They would like us to shoot for a 45-90 seconds. Also our script primarily tells about the painting. Instead she would like it to be two way conversation. One where we offer what we see, but also ask questions to help the viewer go deeper in looking at the piece of artwork. Rachelle said we should be hesitant about putting an answer our there, because it could stop people from trying to think for themselves. Contemporary art is about opening up people’s minds to look at the work in a different way. Research says that when people go to art museums on average they spend about 5 seconds looking at a painting. The purpose of the vodcast should be to help them go deeper and to facilitate viewer interpretation. A metaphor she gave me was it is about seeing someone famous vs. having a deep conversation with a friend. These vodcasts should offer a new voice on these pieces of artwork from a Teacher Perspective. That will require participants to consider what lens they want to look at the artwork from and what story they will tell.