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!

Asus Eee PC

Over the past few months I have been intrigued by a little machine called the Asus Eee PC. At the Central Valley CUE Conference (CVCUE). I met Chris Edmonson from the Clovis School District. He had an Asus Eee PC with him. His district is currently using some of these devices in his distrit with students.

This device falls into a category known as ultraportable devices. It is similar to the OLPC or the Intel Classmate PC. While, the Asus did not receive as much press as these other machines, it is still a great option for schools interested in one-to-one computing. It is not a full laptop in the sense that we are used to. Instead it is more like an Internet appliance. What I mean by that is that you can do a lot of the things you would do with a regular laptop, except that instead of traditional software like Microsoft Office you use a lot of innovative open source and web 2.0 applications. These applications encourage collaborating with one another and producing media that can be published and shared on the web.

The interface is really easy to use. It has four tabs on its main screen: Internet, Work, Learn & Play. The Internet tab includes Skype, an e-book reader, a wireless utility, and site links to Wikipedia, Google Docs, and Internet Radio. Under the work tab it includes Open Office 2.0, built in Acobat Reader and Mozilla's Thunderbird web-client for email. The learn tab includes math and science applications primarily designed for high school. The play tab includes multimedia applications. While it doesn't have a lot of memory, users can upload to online storage places such as Flicker and UTube. The Asus has 4 Gig of Flash memory/ 512 MB of RAM. It is Linux based or Windows XP compatible. It has a built-in video camera, microphone and speakers. More specs are available at the Asus site.

The Asus costs about $200. Connie Jaeger, technology coordinator from the Mequon-Thiensville School District brings up a good point though. That is, if your district does not have a strong wireless infrastructure while the device is cheap you will be paying for it through infrastructure costs.

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".

ePals To Provide Education Software for Classmate PCs

Ed tech developer ePals this week announced that it's developing education tool's for the Classmate PC, Intel's low-cost, ruggedized laptops designed for elementary and middle school students. It's also part of Intel's World Ahead Program for bringing technology to students around the world, particularly students in "emerging" cultures.

Read article by Dave Negral in The Journal

Intel and Negroponte Split Over the $100 Laptop

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both ran articles this week about Intel leaving Negroponte's OLPC Nonprofit Organization. OLPC is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to bring learning opportunities to the most remote and poorest children of the world by providing connected, low-cost and rugged laptops to each and every child in their daily lives.

Intel had paid $6 million and promised to contribute another $12 million to Negroponte's organization. The dispute is over Intel's aggressive marketing of the Classmate PC.

Online Videos of Ultraportable Devices

The CoSN Emerging Technology Committee Blog has information about ultraportable devices including some online videos of some of the devices.