Author: admin

I’m not particularly inclined to write self-revelatory prose here, but my experience yesterday related directly to the issues I discuss in this website, and the insights I took from it have some broader applications.

Yesterday I was presenting my “Shifting Platforms/Shifting Paradigms” talk at the CLMS/CLHS conference in San Diego. Though I had limited time, I was lucky enough to attend Alan November’s opening keynote before my session time. His talk was exciting and inspirational, and though I worried that a few of his points were similar to mine, I felt that my talk was actually a great (if less expert) companion to his.

I went to my assigned room, set up, and waited…and NO ONE CAME!

Well, it didn’t turn out as badly as that, as I started to pack up with my tail between my legs, a couple of people came in, and we sat down and had a good conversation, roughly following the outline of my original talk (I did skip the small group breakout however).

I’m not posting this as a public licking of wounds (well, maybe just a little bit), nor am I suggesting that the conference attendees should have come to my session.  Rather, I came to a couple of realizations about this new world that I’m attempting to enter.

These may seem completely obvious to those of you who have been attending and speaking at conferences over time, but I write them as advice to myself as much as others.

First, for breakout sessions people want skills more than big ideas.  The “Shifting Platforms…” talk is pretty good, but it was the same type of territory explored in the keynote.  In a brief walkaround I noticed that the largest and most enthusiastic crowd was in a session dedicated to exploring Google Wave (if no one showed up, I was going to go in there myself!).  People need to be inspired and given food for thought, but they want concrete takeaways as well.  Luckily the two new presentations I’m writing have a much more concrete “hot button” angle, so I hope to address this.

Second, people attach to presenters as much as to topics.  Beside the issues with the general topic, people didn’t come because they didn’t know who I am and whether listening to me would be worth their limited time.  In part this is a function of time and experience, but it is also a function of direct networking.  I was not able to get to the conference until immediately before my session.  I might have had more success if I had come the night before and talked to some people about what I was doing.  I can’t forget that this is a people business, and if I make a PowerPoint, they won’t necessarily come.

Humbled by the experience (and who can’t use a bit of humiliation now and then?) I hope I can learn the lessons it brings to me and focus on giving people what they want and not just what I want to do.

As any of you who have heard me speak or read my posts know, I’m currently going through a “crisis of faith” regarding PowerPoint.

Don’t get me wrong, I still use is regularly and I know that it ultimately will have a place in my toolbox,  However, I worry that PP has become a Trojan Horse that never opens up.  It was a wonderful way to hook teachers and teach them to become comfortable with their classroom technology.  It was easy and only a small shift from what they have been doing for years.  In the early years it was also a great attention grabber for students.  I believed and hoped that as people became more comfortable with the platform, new uses and paradigms for instruction would emerge.

Well, if that’s happening, I’m not seeing it.  Rather it appears that we (and I include myself in this as just as guilty of non-innovation) are sitting on a PowerPoint Plateau (going to do something with that title in the future).  Even students have caught on with audible sighs as they see the beginning of a new set of slides that have to be copied into their notebooks.  I heard a teacher say “OK, has everyone finished copying from this slide before I go on…” and I knew that the PowerPoint innovation balloon was filled with lead.

In the midst of my despair I was reading a list  (which I can’t find at the moment, but if I do I’ll link it) of tools for teachers and I discovered prezi.com.  I spent an afternoon experimenting and I think that I may have found a multi-use tool that can break some of the PowerPoint malaise and help us to re-examine classroom presentations.

To fully understand the program I suggest that you go to the site and look at samples which are more effective than words, but in short, Prezi uses a single page rather than discrete screens.  Navigation moves from place to place within the page instead of following the direct outline.  The program encourages you to use space, size, and format to build relationships between the various element of the talk.

Prezi is free (with limitations of storage space and a small watermark in the corner of the presentations) or subscription based.  Presentations can be run on the web or downloaded and run in a flash format locally.  The Prezi page can have a preset order or can be navigated by mouse (a great solution to the “prestacked” determinism of PowerPoint).

Now could we fall into the same trap down the road, perhaps, but I am enjoying the challenge of losing my PowerPoint bearings and rethinking my talks as I move some into the new platform.

This may be a platform that could do that rare feat, encourage a new paradigm.

In his great blogpost, “The Search for Thirsty Teachers” on his site The Clever Sheep, Rodd Lucier points to the fact that, “Educators who are active participants in their own learning, tend to be the most engaging teachers I know.”

I remember that one of the most disillusioning realizations I had in my first years of teaching was how few of my colleagues were engaged in any sort of ongoing study, whether organized or informal, in their topic of study or anything beyond popular culture.

As I began to give talks and inservices, I ran into the well-established reality that teachers make the worst students; sometimes disrespectful, often inattentive, and sometimes openly contemptuous of the idea that they could (or needed to) learn anything.

In some ways, educational technology has helped to break through this with many.  I see a greater willingness to learn and an ability to admit ignorance.  There is even excitement as teachers grow in their abilities and recognize potential uses for the tools.

I hope that this is part of the definition of a great teacher, the ability to continue growing and learning with enthusiasm.  My school (and most schools I know) uses the term “life-long learner”  as a desired outcome for students.  The definition of this term must be lived out in the teachers they encounter very day.

Can we envision a future where the teacher coming home from work is greeted by a spouse who asks without irony, “What did you learn in school today?”

I heard it again this week, “How do you keep up with all of this?”

It’s a common refrain whenever I present a new program, online service, or piece of hardware.  While it’s flattering to be treated as an expert (clearly fooled another one), it’s simultaneously disconcerting.  When I hear, “How do you keep up with all this?” I also hear the unstated, “and I have no intention of keeping up with it.”

Another reason I am disturbed by this question is that it reminds me of the truth behind it.  I’m not keeping up.  While I can see the outline of objects flowing in the rushing river of tech development, I know almost nothing about them.  I read teaching and technology blogs and I’m overwhelmed with unfamiliar acronyms and confusing processes.  At times I feel like I started the game three turns behind and I’m in a constant struggle to catch up before I’m caught in a web of my own ignorance.

On top of keeping up with news, in starting two separate blogs (and accompanying podcasts) I have created a never-satisfied vacuum for content (not to mention my neglected Facebook page and my daily attempts to say something of value on Twitter).  I pined for invitations to Google Voice and Google Wave, but now that I have them, I don’ have time to sort them out (I think that Wave may take me the rest of my life).  This morning I received an invitation to participate in the new Twitter Lists program, and I all I could think was, “Great, here’s another tool I’ll feel guilty for not using.

Which brings me back to the questioner.  I don’t know how to advise him or her to keep up with technology since I can’t keep up.  I know I spend a good portion of every day reading, listening to podcasts and thinking about it, but I doubt that is possible or desirable for many people.  I sometimes want to say, “Start 15 years ago and follow the stream up to today, and you’ll still feel overwhelmed.”

We may have been born boomers or GenXers or Millennials, but we are all becoming Generation O’s…Overloaded!

I recently read an interview with an author of relatively the same age as I.  Inevitably discussion turned to his work habits.  He talked at length about his IBM Selectric typewriter, remarking that he couldn’t compose on a computer and he couldn’t really understand those who could.

At least I think it was the Selectric, it may have been a Remington, or maybe he was one who writes all of his manuscripts longhand, maybe with a quill pen.

This nostalgia for a previous platform is so common it seems part of our genetic makeup.  I certainly don’t begrudge any of these writers their preferred platform of creation; however, I am concerned with the unstated suggestion that somehow there is intrinsic merit in the use of an older form.  A level of comfort and familiarity (both personal goods) are broadened to a societal good.  You can hear the author’s smug silent comment, “I’m not saying that writing on a computer is bad, it’s just that I wouldn’t do it.”

No one today says to Mr. Selectric, “I don’t know how you can write with an electric typewriter.  The manual typewriter is such a purer experience.”  Probably, however, at some point someone did.  Whenever a new platform emerges, it can be disruptive to those comfortable with the old.

This is where nostalgia becomes delusional.  Remembering older platforms fondly (and using older platforms that work for an individual) is culturally beneficial, we should not lose our history.  However, it is wrong to tie ourselves and others to an older model based on the fact that it is traditional.  New technologies should not be blindly accepted as better because they are new, but older technologies should not be stubbornly maintained because they are old.

The old mocking the new is a pattern of human existence, the mirror of the new discounting the old.  I am happy for Mr. Selectric and hope he continues to produce great works with his beloved machine, but I would never suggest to a budding writer that he or she learn how to use an electric typewriter (if I could find one!).

Different is neither better nor worse, it’s only different

Two articles caught my attention this week. The first was an article from the Computer World blog taken from April 2007; the second was from the current issue of the Daily Princetonian. Both articles were about e-books, and though they came from different times and slightly different perspectives, there was a similar underlying theme
The blogpost in Computer World was one of those ubiquitous lists found all over the Internet.  This one was called “Don’t Believe the Hype: The 21 Biggest Technology Flops.”  It outlined several heralded gadgets and technologies that never took off.   I am a sucker for this kind of list, and I enjoyed reading about the usual suspects, the Apple Newton, Microsoft Bob, the paperless office; then I came to:

The e-Reader

At this point, the biggest e-Reader was the Sony, and the article said that there was not a good enough machine and not enough content to make the purchase worthwhile.  Similarly the reading experience was criticized, ” Some folks find them unwieldy; others say they’re difficult to use. And for many people, there’s just no replacing the old-fashioned, reassuring feel of paper.”

November of 2007 the Kindle was released.  Since that time it has sold over half a million units and millions of books have been sold.  Recently the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s novel, The Lost Symbol sold more of the Kindle version than the regular hardcover.  Sales for the Sony e-Reader have also increased, and there are other companies, including rumors of Apple and Microsoft, jumping into the mix.

The second article “Kindles yet to woo University users” is a post-Kindle expression of many of the same ideas as the first.  The author talks about a pilot program providing Kindles with course reading materials preinstalled for students.  Though the university expected positive results, the article cites “many” student complaints, “But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.”

The article goes on to discuss the student complaints including problems with citation, problems with annotation and highlighting, and problems with the unfamiliar form factor.  The unstated conclusion seems to be that the experiment is a flop and students will return to traditional texts for the foreseeable future.

I wonder if the author of the list of 21 flops would have  included e-books in his list if he knew that the Kindle was coming.  Likewise, the writer from the Princetonian makes assumptions about the future of a platform based on a somewhat shaky start.  I agree with many of the criticisms of the Kindle, but I see these as areas of growth, not dead ends.  The Courier, a new tablet from Microsoft seems to address many of them.  The need to move away from paper textbooks for convenience, for environmental factors, and for economic reasons is a stronger drive than the weaknesses of the early unit.

This article falls victim of the limitation of much of the media’s approach to technology.  There are only two angles for articles.  The first is the “Oh, wow!” article, commenting on how wonderful a new technology is, and then there is the “Ha-ha” article, showing how a bright new technology flops (I suppose by grouping all of this writing into two camps I am just as guilty of over-simplifying).  The reality of course is not nearly so simple as this.

When evaluating new platforms, we need to take a long view.  Many of the devices introduced today will not pan out long term, but many of them will succeed on their own path and their own timetable.  Even some of the flops will have an important role in the evolution of effective devices (interesting rumors about an Apple pad swirled this week after Apple rehired the man who created the Newton).  Maybe today’s flops are just ahead of their time.

This is the fourth blog I’ve started.  Two I have “retired” (or as close to retired as one can get on the eternal Internet), and one I continue to maintain as the other side of my web voice.

We, the crusaders of educational technology, are always starting new things.  Whether it is a new piece of hardware, a new program, or a new implementation of our favorite tools, we are always working with new platforms.

And that’s what I want to approach in this blog