Attending the annual One-to-One computing conference at Penn State this week. This morning’s keynote was un-notable and the first breakout session that I attended (on Web2.0 tools) was basically the same old stuff that we’ve seen again and again and again. So now I’m sitting on the couch in the lobby feeling a little less than thrilled. Reflecting on some things and figured that I might start working out some thoughts here…

I’m beginning to think we are just spinning our wheels for all our talk about the undeniable wealth of valuable teaching tools that are now available to us with nothing more than an internet connection. We give professional development after professional development, attend conference after conference, hold discussion after discussion, and still the migration of new teaching tools into the classroom and the foundational shift in instrucational practice to an energized collaborative authentic learning environment is just soooo painfully slow. Why?

If you ask the general educational audience..it seems to come back to one thing - TIME. But to me that just reaks of lame excuse. We always cry “we don’t have the time” (the time to learn new things, to try new ideas, to experiment, to change), and I think we do that because its such an easy justification for inaction. I know a good number of teachers that seem to have found all the time they need to do such wonderful things in their classroom - integrating new ideas and technologies into every aspect of thier lesson plans. So I think it just comes down to the failure to properly motivate and provide the appropriate incentives to instill these practices, ideas, strategies, paradigms. Its an issue not of time, but of leadership. We need strong leaders to make the delicate and hard and firm and strategic decisions that will ensure our priorities are more substantial than conference-babble. Its a management issue now. We’ve lobbed the grenade into the crowd and the good ideas have stuck to those who are willing. From here on out it comes down to the management wizardry (and the same basic motivational techniques we practiced in our own classrooms) to find out how to reach the reluctant, the scared, the lazy, and the disinterested.

Well…that’s just some random thoughts.

I just recieved my spiffy little Edublogger membership badge from Patricia Donaghy who manages things at the International Edubloggers Directory. I’m proud to be a member, albiet a small fish in a big sea.

Anyhow, in checking out Patricia’s blog, I noticed this interesting post about a facinating online tool called Visuwords. I tell you what, even if you aren’t a word geek this tool will still be interesting to you. Makes more sense if you check it out but the basic premise is this - provide a word, any word….then a beautiful graphic reporesentation of the relationship of that word to other words and phrases dynamically generates within the browser. You can dig into deeper associations by double clicking on subsequent words and word combinations.

At least you’ll learn what a hyponym, hypernym, meronym, and holonym are. Trust me, its much cooler than it sounds.

VISUWORDS

Here’s a couple blog posts I found interesting this week…

Actively Opposing Creativity Fatigue
Six Degrees of Separation in Instant Messaging
Shopping for a Wiki Tool?
Audio Transcript from “The Evolving Federal Role in Education”

After a white knuckle sled ride on 81N yesterday afternoon, I did make it home from three days of the PETE&C geek-fest. My presentation on Second Life went well and I send out big cudos to my ‘virtual’ friends Kathy Schrock, Kevin Jarrett, Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon for contributing to my talk on the implications of SL on developing learning communities and the future of distance education. Thanks to those folks we were able to provide a really good demonstration of how real-world connections can be made and fostered within SL. Generated a lot of discussion and excitement I think. Session notes can be found here.

I wasn’t able to get notes posted about Steve Dembo’s keynote yesterday. He gave a great talk and if I have time later, I’ll summarize my written notes on here. Until then, Kristin Hokanson over at The Connected Classroom recorded the presentation. Hope I’m not taking any liberties by reposting it here.

I should mention one thing that I took away from Monday’s Keynote by David Pogue. Two words - SKYPE PHONE! Chris and I played with Skype on our Verizon XV6700’s today. We are both running the WM6 ROM hack on these devices. We downloaded the CAB files and installed with no trouble. Minutes later we were connected to our wireless network chatting over the internet from our cell phones. (Note that the XV6700 are wifi enabled) I should also mention that we then used the BT Audio program to force feed the audio to our bluetooth earpieces. Extremely simple and works well. This will definately get me to use Skype more often.

Lloyd Onyett - Indiana University of Pennsylvania
aka Komputer Merlin

IUP has several islands, incl. Crimson Island and Archaeology Island

About 75 teachers at IUP involved to some degree.
Training education students to use SL.

Very general overview of SL using powerpoint primarily