What is it about Popular Speakers?

Becker lays out further arguments against Gladwell's anecdotal style.

Interestingly, a comment popped up in his thread about whether he'd make the same arguments against Ken Robinson's book 'The Element'. And I think that brings up the question in general about using anecdotal evidence to make general societal claims.

And whether Gladwell is making the generalization or Robinson is making the generalization, I think we -- as critical thinkers -- have the right, as well as an obligation, to call them on it. Especially when those generalizations are being presented in an argument attempting to redefine how we think about education. And especially on stage in front of a conference of teachers where said keynote speaker can easily make the annual salary of two of us combined by giving a canned 40 minute speech.

To my mind, there's a danger in the blind acceptance of this as 'just the way it goes with popular speakers'.

Does this mean I'm against anecdotes?

Of course not; I use them myself all the time. But when I do use them, I try to present them as they are for what they are, whereas all too often in the work of certain writers, there is a tendency to take a single anecdote and turn it into a blueprint for the big picture. This rarely works. Especially in non-fiction.

Lives are more complicated than that.

Non-profits in Ed Tech

Looking from info from you all.

What non-profits are taking an active role in hardware/device accessibility as well as open source apps and the like?

Comment away. I'm interested.

I Must Be A Malcolm Gladwell Hater

Lots of chatter in the comments to last week's blog post about the Malcolm Gladwell keynote at NECC.

Here are excerpts from recent commenter opinions:

The need that some people have to be simply given more and more and more - what is it about human beings that they become so self-absorbed that they don't appreciate quality but instead just attack it and say, oh it wasn't enough for "us."

and

it seems that instead of just being glad to have such a brilliant mind speaking at your event - he's done bigger events - you're instead expecting Gladwell to deliver the knowledge that you have (or your peers) rather than being glad to receive what Gladwell is good at /for and experienced in.

and

Y'all must not give many keynote speeches. The speaker is on the circuit to promote a book, or other product. He or she gives dozens of such speeches a year. While most do attempt to build in some sort of reference to the event audience, the speech/slides/jokes are necessarily not from-scratch original every time.

Rather than comment further... (a - I'm not saying it was good enough for 'us'; I'm saying it wasn't any good; b - Personally, I don't think Gladwell is a 'brilliant mind', and anyway I'm no one's hagiographer; c - If that's the case with keynotes that pay out such mucho bucks, then that's just lame and we shouldn't stand for it)... I'll just let a few pros take on Gladwell.

Check out these heavy-thinking pieces about Malcolm's work from two guys a heck of a lot smarter than me; here's links to new critical pieces on two fine (and very different) blogs: EducationalInsanity and Edjurist.

2nd day over at Change.org: Talking 21st Century Skills Blues

Second day of guest blogging over at Change.org. Today's post: on the singularity, ed tech, and those 21st century skills blues.

Check it out, and while you are at it, sign the petition to ban the pre-pre-SAT!

Around the Horn

Steve Hargadon is organizing a ton of post-NECC data, recaps, brainstorming, and whathaveyou. I'm especially looking forward to the debriefing on Edubloggercon, the Bloggers' Cafe, and NECC Unplugged on Elluminate Live Sessions this Wednesday, July 8th, at 9pm Eastern.

Dangerously Irrelevant announces Leadership Day 2009. A little something to help admins get up to speed.

New post on Weblogg-ed regarding 'Digital Inclusion'; Artichoke is thinking about museum-style recommendation systems in education; and Nash is playing with Spheres again.

Nice day for ed tech in the blogosphere.

Blogging this Week at Change.org

Guest blogging all week over at Change.org.

Here is my first post, a little something on the disconnects that exist between students, teachers, schools, and technologies.

This week will mostly focus on matters of perception regarding educators and the current Digital Age cultural shift.

While we're talking 'Primary Sources': Collaborating with the US National Archives

Yesterday, I posted about opportunities for teachers to use the resources of the Library of Congress' 'TPS' Project.

Today, let's take a look at what's available from the National Archives.

Back in March, the Archives launched a social networking site geared towards social studies and history teachers. The name of the project is 'Collaborate'.

Collaborate serves as the virtual meeting place for members of the National Archives education team and colleagues from schools, institutions, and organizations outside of the government to share innovative ideas and best practices and to give advice on how to improve our new website at every stage of its development.

Here's a brief video from the project site:
..

And here is the link to the Collaborate site.

In a sign that someone in D.C. really understands what social media is all about, they are asking teachers what it is that we'd like them to do with Collaborate:

When we give teachers using this new website the option to choose other primary source documents to place inside the activity frameworks, how many choices will they want? For instance, the National Archives Education Team can hand pick and limit the number of documents that teachers will be able to choose from; or we can give teachers the ability to search through the approximately 92,000 images available digitally in our online Archival Research Catalog (ARC). Which option would teachers prefer? Should we do both - give teachers the option to choose a hand-picked set of documents as well as the option to search through ARC?

All of this is pointing in the right direction. Greater resources for teachers, greater transparency in government, and a focus on getting past the filter of the textbook industry and tackling primary sources head-on.

The Library of Congress offers Teachers Independence from Textbooks

To all my US teacher readers and subscribers: Happy 4th of July!

Here's a remarkable little project you could share with your students. It's a draft edit of the Declaration of Independence straight from the Library of Congress; and, in sort of faux-Diigo form, it allows students to think about and choose how they would have submitted the final draft of the text.

It's a poignant little exercise and it's one of many many many pieces of the LOC's new 'Teaching with Primary Sources' project.

The project was presented during NECC this year and features both primary source based lessons and themed resources, as well as primary source sets on everything from the history of the Dust Bowl to the history of Baseball.

The Library of Congress: Doing it's Part to Offer Teachers Independence from Textbooks.

Guest Blogging Next Week at Change.org

Just got the thumbs up.

All next week, I'll be guest blogging at Change.org's Education blog.

Thanks to Clay Burell for thinking of me to sit in for a week; I'll start Monday.

Go check out Burell's writing there, excellent work by a guy willing to let you know exactly where he stands on the issues. Be sure to subscribe and do mosey around and checkout all Change.org has to offer.

The Hype Cycle

Over at elearnspace, Siemens blogs today about what he describes as the 'hype cycle' of new technology.

Discusses the sort of semi-tragic (in the structural sense) lifespan of any new technology. From obscurity to kingliness to downfall and obscurity to eventual heroic purposeful return.

Sounds alot like Sophocles' Oedipus.

As we suffer what will be bumps in the ed tech road with regard to the integration of social and participatory media technologies into the classroom, it's a point worth thinking about.

Talk about Brainwashing...

I've got a new tagline.

A reader writes:

Does paperless also include factless? Is your teaching teaching or just brainwashing for the world government?

Finally, someone's got me figured out!

Shelly Blake-Plock: Brainwashing on behalf of the World Government since 2002!

Friday Chat goes on Summer Break

The Friday Chat is finally going on summer break.

I'm going to be on the road over the next few weeks and though I'll continue daily blogging and Tweeting, I can't commit to knowing exactly where I'm going to be any given Friday at 1PM EST to run the chat. So, we'll give the Friday Chat a break and pick it up again with the school year come late August.

For those interested, here's a link to all of the TP posts either describing, recapping, or reflecting previous chats we've had.

Most Read TeachPaperless Posts

It's July!

Here's a list of the top ten most read posts on TeachPaperless last month. Feel free to bookmark, Diigo, share, and repost... cc 3.0 rules!

1. This is Zeitgeist Stuff
2. At the End of the Anomaly of the Age of Printed Books
3. Like I Need a Second Life
4. Thank You, Teachers
5. CEO of We Are Teachers Responds to Criticism
6. (un)Planned Obsolescence?
7. Your Students Write Alot? Apparently, Mine Don't.
8. Hire Geeks
9. What Is the Purpose of this Blog?
10. This is the Moment: Legitimize Social Media in the Classroom Now!

As always, thank you for reading, subscribing, commenting, and asking questions here at TeachPaperless. You all are the source of energy that produces this blog on a daily basis.

LearnCentral

Led a session yesterday within the virtual rooms at NECC. Using Elluminate technology, the presentation incorporated a shared desktop, live audio, chat/backchannel, and sort of a live shared browser.

I've been taking part in these types of sessions for some time now, but only as an audience participant. I like the format. It's rather utilitarian, (my wide teases me about being addicted to all of the ham-radio things the Internet has to offer), but it works great and I especially like the ability to just pop into a session and see what's happening.

So after yesterday's session, the moderator Kim Caise told me to check out LearnCentral.org which is another project of Classroom 2.0 founder Steve Hargadon. I go there this morning to discover over 4,600 educators using the profile-based sm and free Elluminate rooms.

Where have I been?

That's the thrill of the Internet and social media. Just when you think you've got a handle on things, something flies out in front of you and demonstrates just how much you still have to learn.

Some people are turned off by this.

I live for this.

NECC 2009: My Conclusion

Somebody bring me my horse.

It's time for this ed tech pilgrim to get up and ride.

Twenty-five posts in three-and-a-half days. Twenty-three pages of text. Over eight-thousand-two-hundred words.

And that doesn't count my live-blogging account of the Gladwell Mac keynote. That alone would add another three pages.

That's a lot of blogging.

Hopefully at least some of it was useful to someone. It certainly was useful to me to do it. Talk about a learning experience. Thinking, writing, posting, disagreeing with yourself.

And then the endless Tweets. Tweets about what? Places and sessions that now only exist in our memories and in our media.

There's meaning in there somewhere. I'll leave that to the real writers to work out. I bet Samuel Beckett would have been a hell of a Twitterer.

As for me, I've come to realize over the last few days that I was made for blogging; it gives me stamina; it defines and distills my thinking. It also challenges me because I am a total obsessive freak and what I blog often explains to me what I think.

That gets me in trouble occasionally.

It also makes me realize: I was made for these times.

***

Thank you to ISTE and ISTEConnects for making this possible. Thank you to the organizers and presenters. Thanks to the real media who put up with me drinking their coffee. Thanks to my fellow bloggers and to all of the folks I met both in real life and in sessions online.

Most of all, thanks to the teachers and students who are the reason all of this happens.

Thank you to my wife MJ for covering for me (and putting up with me).

I've got three elementary schoolers at home and I feel like more than anything I was blogging for them. And they're gonna have a laugh someday when they look back and see how old fashioned we all were.

Thank you Ro, Abe, and Johanna.

Daddy's coming home.

Flocabulary

Now we're talking: hanging out here in NECC's virtual realm I just caught a session with Anne Batchelder that showcased Flocabulary, which according to its website:

creates original hip-hop music and standards-based curricular materials to teach academic content for grades 3-12. Flocabulary programs are proven to increase student motivation and achievement and are currently being used in over 10,000 schools nationwide.

Everyone from Howard Zinn and Cornel West to Good Morning America and Oprah has blurbed good things about the program.

Now, as a musician myself, I can testify to the power of music and song for teaching concepts in the classroom. I've brought in drums to teach poetic meter, I've had students use GarageBand to score music demonstrating that they understood where mood and tone changed in a narrative, and I've used the piano to demonstrate conceptually the differences between formal and open forms of poetry.

We also translate the lyrics of Brazilian pop songs in Latin class and listen to jazz in Art History. Music can go a long way towards helping students engage with and understand content.

And that's one of the key points: the music has to lead to deeper engagement and understanding. We're not talking about using music simply as a memory aid.

Of course, Flocab will be an aid to memory -- and that's great -- but it's my understanding watching the presentation and reading about the program that Flocabulary is much more than that. It's really driven by a sense of how to motivate learning. Combined with a teacher who can then draw out the big questions related to language and history, and access the knowledge students are internalizing through song, well... it's a powerful duo.

So, I'm excited to hear this stuff -- especially given the thumbs up from Profs. Zinn and West (two of my favs).

Are any of you all using Flocabulary? Please tell us about your experience. Or just your experiences -- for better or worse -- in using music in the classroom.

Twitter as an Assessment Tool: NECC 2.0 Session TODAY at 1PM EST

At 1PM EST today, I'm going to be leading a virtual session on the topic: 'Twitter as an Assessment Tool'.

This will take place in Virtual Room A in the NECC 2.0 Elluminate Rooms. To take part, follow this link and scroll down to the sessions.

Click on 'Virtual Room A' and sign into the room.

If you have not used Elluminate before, you'll need to download the browser, but it's painless and well worth the time.

We'll be talking about using Twitter in assessment as a lifeline, for review sessions, as a collaborative bibliography tool, for collab assessment, using Twitterfall in open tests, and using Twitter to vet class Wikis.

Hope to see you there.

KMLFactbook: a presentation from NECC that will change the way you think about using stats and maps in the classroom

Watching an NECC session from Elluminate Live as a virtual participant.

The subject is KMLFactbook, which as far as I can tell could make all of those demographic and statistical charts in your old history textbooks completely obsolete.

The trick?

KMLFactbook merges the online CIA World Factbook with Google Earth.

What does this mean for you?

You and your students will be able to project data directly into Google Earth; create new map layers; and then export the data to online spreadsheets and other web-based presentation apps.

Here's an example: You want to know the relative GDP for all of the countries in Western Europe. Just click 'Western Europe' and 'GDP' in the CIA World Factbook and the data will immediately manifest as a layer in Google Earth.

You can even take your own data and slap it right onto Google Earth via KMLFactbook. Or try out applications bringing in data from Wolf/Alpha.

I'm immediately going to make a layer of world soccer stats.

ISTEvision: Digital Stories from Teachers and Students

One part of the virtual NECC has been ISTEvision.

My favorite aspect of the site is the section devoted to digital stories by real teachers and real students.

From the story of a rural Idaho classroom which has connected to a classroom in New Zealand to teacher statements about their commitment to bringing authentic educational uses of technology into their classrooms, this series of videos -- from the amateur to the glossy -- is testament to the dedication of teachers and students to meeting the demands of the 21st century.

The Other Side

There's a whole 'other' world at NECC, you know.

It's the world there just below the physical reality of the convention center. Some folks are tuned into it, others will have left the conference never having been aware of its existence.

It's the virtual world of NECC Unplugged.

Since Monday, there have been over 40 presentations in the Elluminate Live Room as well as through the virtual rooms and live feeds. They've covered various topics not readily available elsewhere at NECC such as a 'research 2.0' demo of Diigo, an intro to Sugar Lab's open source collaborative learning platform, a wiki roundtable with Adam Frey from Wikispaces, as well as hands-on sessions explaining how to actually USE social media of all sorts in a classroom setting.

I'll be spending this, the final day of NECC 2009, exploring the virtual side.