I’ve been looking forward to this session. It’s another online presentation, a Webinar, for the Discovery Educator Network. We did some run-throughs yesterday, with mixed success. The problems seem to stem from the fact that I’m using a Mac. Lots of people use Macs. They need to fix that. As it turned out, the company had, but not in the version that DEN is using. And they keep asking if I’m using an Intel Mac. Do I really need an Intel Mac? Can I sell Brenda on that? 🙂

To add excitement to the whole thing, New England DEN members will be in the room with me, so I’ll actually have some humans to present to. Should be easier.

The topic is about flat. It’s how hierarchies, of many different types and styles, are fading. We’ve all heard about the flattening of the world (The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman). But what about the flattening of the web and of information in general. And, in what ways, might we consider our classrooms flattening, and how do we drive learning, if we can’t rely on gravity any more? A good question.

• Online wiki handouts for Flat Classrooms

I’ll be spending three days at Guilford Technical Community College helping ed tech staff in developing an online course on educational podcasting and doing a number of presentations to community college faculty from GTCC and other parts of the state.

There will be three basic presentations with three wiki online handouts.

Day 1

• Podcasting as a Teaching & Learning Tool
• Educator’s Guide to Blogging
• Harnessing the New Shape of Information: Web 2.0

Day 2

• Podcasting as a Teaching & Learning Tool
• Learning & Literacy for the 21st Century
• Write & Wrong on the Information Highway

Day 3

• Podcasting as a Teaching & Learning Tool
• The New Shape of Information — School Technology Committee
• Teaching & Learning on the Edge of Change (New Stories of T&L) — The Developmental Faculty

This is the last TechForum of the season, and it’s a new city, Seattle, Washington. They have asked me to keynote this conference, and I was reminded last week that my very first conference keynote was one of the Technology & Learning TechExpo conferences, in New York City. So it’s coming full circle. I hope I do good!

The keynote will be “Telling the New Story.” I guess I should find a new title for this, but it’s what it is. Too much of schooling today is based on stories of teaching and learning that are decades and even centuries old. We live in a new era and it is a time of rapid change. Our stories about teaching, learning, education, schools, classrooms, all must change to reflect our children and the future we are preparing them for. For many of the students in our classrooms, the only real connection that they have with the previous century is their classrooms. This is not good!

Here are the online wiki handouts for the keynote address.

• Telling the New Story

It will also be my honor to serve on a panel with Conn McQuinn and Tim Lauer. The topic will be new technologies. I am supposed to talk about the larger view of learning technologies, but I suspect that I’ll be talking about the learning technologies that our children use on their own time. So here are probably the best online wiki handouts for that topic.

• Retooling for the Millennial Child

Finally, I will do another Web 2.0 session, called The Finer Points. The organizers of TechForum want us to ramp up our topics to the tech savvy educators who usually attend these sessions. I find it difficult, though, when so many in the audience don’t know what a blog is. So this time I’ll be starting with fundamentals of Web 2.0 — a very brief half-hour overview, and then open it up to a more unconference style of event.

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information
• Web 2.0 — the Finer Points

This will be my first TechForum for the year.  Although I’ll be working hard, serving on and moderating a panel on video games, and moderating a roundtable on open source solutions for education.  Then I do an advanced Web 2.0 session, at last.  And I’m going to do it in the Web 2.0 style.

Here are online handout wikis:

• Web 2.0 online handouts for my introductory presentation
• New Horizons of Web 2.0 

It is a great pleasure to be in Michigan. As a technologist who use to teach history, Michigan is an important place as it provided much of the leadership behind the early Internet.

Today, I’m teaching librarians, and I’m pumped up for it. Last night I had a delightful dinner with some wonderful professionals, learning some disturbing news about librarianship in this state.

That aside, all of my messages here will have much less to do with technology, and much more to do with information. I’m prepared to deliver one of two keynote addresses. Redefining literacy is about the basic skills that are critical to function as a citizen of the 21st century. Librarians all know this stuff, but building context is always important.

I may, on the other hand, deliver an address called, Telling the New Story, which also builds context about the stories we should be telling in our communities about teaching, learning, and schools in the 21st century, stories that are grounded in the market place, deeply held values, and that we can model in our actions and words.

Here are the online handouts for both keynotes:

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century
• Telling the New Story

Here are online handouts for my other two sessions:

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information
• An Educators Guide to Podcasting

You can also track this conference through its bloggers at its Hitchhikr site.

What a fantastic theme for an educational technology conference, and I only just realized how true it plugs in to the presentations I will be making today. Unfortunately, I will not be doing my World is Flat presentation, which is fine, since nearly everyone has read it now. In fact, my theme continues from Friday in NYC.

The keynote address will be about communicating in an increasingly networked, digital, and overwhelming information landscape. What does literacy mean in this rapidly changing world. The online wiki handouts can be found here.

• Literacy & Learning in the 21st Century

That session will be followed up by the new web, Web 2.0. However, I’ll be throwing in flat world here, because, in a very real sense, the web is flattening from a place where only those with the technical skills could publish, to one where most anyone can participate in the web-conversation.

• The Flattening of the Web

My final session will be about blogging. This will be a rough but fairly rich overview of blogging, what it looks like, how you start, and how you finish.

• An Educator’s Guide to Blogging

Technorati Tags: ceca2006 ceca06

I appreciate the theme of this conference, Web of Complexity: Challenges & Opportunities for Schools in the Internet Age. And my Dad would say that I’m in high cotton, presenting here at the Grand Hyatt in mid-town Manhattan, next to Grand Central Station.

Such thrills for the North Carolina country boy aside, my work here seems to be continuing a basic theme for my presentations, a general large group address (keynote) about technology and literacy, followed by a usually well-attended breakouts session on the new web tools — Web 2.0. The message is simple. Information has changed. It is increasingly networked, digital, and overwhelming. As a result, our notions of basic literacy (reading skills, numeracy, and communication skills) must also change. ..and it isn’t a matter of adding a new (digital, technology, etc.) literacy, but redefining the basics of what skills are basic to using information to accomplish goals — learning literacies.

Here are the online wiki handouts:

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century
• The New Story of Education in the 21st Century

The overall purpose of the Web 2.0 session is to introduce educators to the underlying concepts of the changing nature of information, and to demonstrate a number of new tools that illustrate these concepts, including blogging, podcasting, wikis, social bookmarks, and RSS.

Here are the online wiki handouts:

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information

I’m at the STEM Digital Content Conference in Saint Paul, Minnesota, put on by the Minnesota Department of Education. STEM stands for Science, Technology, engineering, and Math, and it is a major focus in the U.S. right now. Our emphasis on stems (pun intended) from increased globalization and a sense of competitiveness here in the U.S.

STEM projects rely a great deal on digital content, so the focus of my keynote will be on literacy in an increasingly digital and networked world. The structure will be virtually identical to my often performed 21st Century Literacy address, but I am working in all science examples. So we’ll be talking about the first male pregnancy and machinima. Online handouts are a wiki page.

• Redefining Literacy wiki handouts

After the keynote, I will deliver a concurrent session on Web 2.0 applications. We’ll look at blogs, wikis, podcasting, social bookmarks, RSS, and aggregators, and it is guaranteed to have these science teachers on the edges of their seats. Handouts are also a wiki page.

• Harnessing the New Web wiki handouts

It’s October in Maine, and I have the honor of keynoting this forward moving state’s educational technology conference. It is important that I start by applauding this Maine’s adventure in modern education. It took an astounding amount of vision and courage to go here, and even more work to begin to capture the potential. It will not happy in a month, a year, or a decade. But it starts by somebody turning around, facing forward, and Maine has done that.

To continue hitch hiking this conference go to the…

• ACTEM Hitchhikr Page

Day 1

This will be a three-hour afternoon workshop on the new web, Web 2.0. It’s an awkward term, but it has stuck. I did the same workshop las week in South Carolina with educators who were already mastering many of the new web applications, educators who had researched and had a practical notion of what the read/write web is a bout, and many who had only heard it in conversations, and believed that it was in important thing to be learning about. The workshop was fairly free form, and I suspect that today’s session will be the same. Topics will include, but not be limited to:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• RSS
• Social Bookmarks
• Social Media
• Aggregators
• Podcasting

Here is a link to the wiki handouts for this session:

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information

Day 2

The general conference with my keynote address on contemporary literacy. I’ve presented this topic for many years now, but almost every day I am reminded of how important it is, that merely being able to read, perform basic math, and write a coherent paragraph are no longer enough to be literate when information is increasingly digital, networked, and overwhelming. This presentation seeks to expand our notions of literacy to define what it means to be a reader, processor of information, and communicator in this time of rapid change.

The wiki handouts are at:

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century

Two Follow-up Sessions

These sessions are entitled “Follow-up Sessions”. I am not sure how they will work out, because the attendees may have specific topics that they want to explore. If so, I will post some notes here later. If I end out steering the sessions, then the first one will likely be about leading education into the new century by telling new stories about teaching, learning, and 21st century classrooms. The second session will probably be about Web 2.0. If these turn out to be the case, then I will post links later.

I will most likely do the

• 11:00 – Telling the New Story
• 1:00 – Right & Wrong on the Information Highway

It is a real privilege and honor to be speaking at the South Carolina EdTech Conference. This is not only because South Carolina is a neighbor, but also because it was in South Carolina that I taught school for nearly ten years. So feel very much at home with people who love the flavor of their words so much, that they just let them out slowly and with great joy.

Day 1

I am teaching a workshop this morning (Wednesday) about Web 2.0. Participants will lear to set up a blog and to tag their blogs for aggregation by readers. They will also learn to set up their own aggregators so that they can establisher their own personal digital libraries or personal learning networks (whatever metaphor you want to use). We will also explore social networks, social bookmarks, mashups, wikis, and maybe some podcasting.

• Web 2.0 online wiki handouts

Day 2

What I Looked Like for my First Job Interview — 1976

The morning will begin with two concurrent sessions, and then the keynote address, Literacy & Learning for the 21st Century. I will introduce attendees to the future through my tour of the typical information-age work place. We will then explore an expanded model for literacy, one that grows out of the three Rs, but reflects the changing shape of information.

• Literacy & Learning wiki handouts

I will also be doing sessions on RSS and Podcasting, a pretty good combination. RSS will essentially be a one our version of my Web 2.0 workshop from the day before. After all, RSS is the mortar of the New Web. We’ll look at blogging, touch on wikis, social media, and then knock folks socks off with aggregators.

• RSS online wiki handouts

Finally, I’ll be doing my podcasting session. It will begin with a basic introduction to podcasting, what it looks like, how it’s used in the K-12 arena, then we’ll quickly produce a podcast, perhaps even publish the podcast that I am currently trying to finish up.

• Podcasting online wiki handouts