Jed Friedrichsen presents the opening session this morning at the 2007 Blendedschools.net conference. Discussing a ‘new mindset’ in digital natives. A general discussion about some of the qualities of the digital native and a survey of statistics regarding the changing face of the 21st century.

Information Week, 2007 list of ‘Greatest Web software ever written’. Apache, Alta Vista, Craigslist, THe Well and eBay were top 5. Strange list. I’m guessing that they were basing it on the pioneers - the first organizations that spearheaded a certain type of web technology.

Currently 28 states that have virtual schools.

Data from Sloan Consortium on pattern of public school use of online education.

Bill Tucker - data supports similar academic achievement between traditional and online learner. Hmmm.

Average age then kids medium-use gamers is 6. Data from advertising study (didn’t catch the name)

80% of all active Internet users will have a virtual “second life” by 2011 (Gartner, 2007)
(quick Google pulls back this related article)
180,000 blogs created today (other data related to the proliferation of blogosphere)

Discussed the many elements of highly engaging instruction for digital learners.

New features licensed for Blackboard - Lincoln Learning Systems, Genie objects, etc

I’m having a rather productive evening of just lounging on the couch, watching TV and surfing away on the laptop. Finally took a few minutes to play around with Google Docs new presentation feature and IT IS AWESOME! Its got the same great collaborative tools built right in that the word processor and spreadsheet have. The built-in templates look great. Its super easy to use - all the basic format tools and inserted media. When you show the presentation you are presented with a sidebar that includes a link to the online view and will generate a list of users who are connecting to the presentation. I’d consider….dare I say it….dropping Office altogether in favor of Google.

Somehow I don’t think I can ever catch up with all the reading that I need (want) to do. I was actually reading through some older email from one of the Google Groups that I belong to and stumbled across this little gem of a blog post from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach over at TechLearning blog entitled “The Art of Building Virtual Communities”. It targets exactly what my recent passion has been evolving into and provides a great discussion about virtual learning communities (VLC) or online Communities of Practice (CoP). Here’s a shorter version of essentially the same article. I’m actually more interested in helping teachers develop their own ‘personal’ learning communities, while this article seems to focus on the development and facilitation of managed communities, which as she rightly points out, often fail.

Includes a couple really great diagrams to accompany thought provoking concepts regarding participation and facilitation of online learning communities. I particularly like this one.

It looks as if the train is moving in the right direction. I just discovered that the project OpenSim is moving right along in its development of an Open Source implementation of Second Life. I think this is critical to ultimately utilizing virtual worlds as an instructional delivery platform and educational tool. A school could host its own server providing sim space for some educational purpose. The ultimate direction would be to provide some interconnection between private sims and even the public sim. Pretty cool. Maybe our regional consortium should think about hosting a server. Or maybe this could be the development platform I was looking for for the development of a Second Life-esque cyber charter school.

There was a nifty little segment on ABC News this evening. It was the first of a series entitled The Future of the Workplace in which they discussed trend toward virtual workspaces - where the workers don’t necessarily report to an office per se. What was interesting about this (because telecummiting, while certainly becoming more prevailant, has been around for a while) was that they featured the applicaiton of Second Life as a platform to support the virtual workplace. I recorded the small segment and hope to pull some piece of it to use in the Blendedschools presentation I’m giving in October.