I was able to attend three sessions at EduBloggerCon this year and facilitate one. While I still would love to see the event follow the model of a BarCamp, I think the wiki organizational structure worked this year better than in 2008 largely because everyone was able to hold sessions they wanted to offer and there was NOT any voting. Half of the sessions I attended were in the hallways, but I was able to hear speakers fine and didn’t mind at all pulling up chairs and just circling up for a conversation.

I wonder how many school district leaders would be willing to take the approach of EduBloggerCon and ask teachers to organically propose as well as facilitate PD sessions on topics of interest, on which they have expertise as well as a desire to share? The participatory nature of EduBloggerCon is radically different than most teachers’ conception of “sit and get” professional development, but I find the participatory nature of the event to be precisely the thing which makes it highly engaging as well as relevant.

Given the speed of change in our society, a professional development structure like EduBloggerCon lends itself well to address both issues of concern to participants as well as emerging or new ideas. It is wonderful ISTE continues to support EduBloggerCon and provide the space as well as WiFi connectivity for participants completely free of charge. Many thanks to Steve Hargadon for his role in organizing the day and facilitating a super opportunity for co-learning with peers.

In reflecting about EduBloggerCon09, Lisa Thumann noted:

I think that we all know that change is hard. We also know that unless we commit to making change, it won’t happen. The fact is that there is uncertainty as to what jobs are coming down the pike. We don’t know what we are preparing our students for. So we need to create a model that they can carry into their adult lives. I’m working on putting together some short video clips on what educators are doing in their 21st Century Learning classrooms. I talked with a college student, April, yesterday about how she felt that her high school, which she classified as a 21st Century Learning school, helped better prepare her for college. I almost jumped out of my chair in excitement when she explained to me how.

Without EduBloggerCon09, Lisa might have not had that opportunity to dialog with April and have those learning experiences.

Jeff Utecht, also writing reflectively about EduBloggerCon09, noted:

This year….smaller, deeper, and more thoughtful. Exactly what I was hoping for and personally what I need to push my own thinking. It was one of those days where you went to one but watch others via Twitter. You wanted to go to all the sessions…and in some ways you did via the conversations that happened between the actual sessions.

As of this evening, just over 360 photos from EduBloggerCon09 have been uploaded and shared on Flickr using the tag “ebc09.)

I wonder to what degree does EduBloggerCon reflect the learning environment of the future for our students as well as ourselves? The day is filled with choice: Choices about sessions to attend, and sessions to lead. Virtually everyone has a laptop, and most people are actually using laptops during sessions to take notes and engage in backchannel conversations. WiFi is open, available, fast and free. Conversations extend from the scheduled sessions into the lunch hour, and continue online. Dialog is richer because of the online discussions which have taken place prior to the event, and are deepened as a result of the face-to-face time spent together.

When will students in our schools be able to experience a similar day of learning to what participants in EduBloggerCon09 were able to share? I hope that day is soon.

These prospects for shared, online learning surrounding a face-to-face conference reminded me this week of a situation in the fall of 2005, when I attempted (unsuccessfully) to catalyze live blogging and sharing from the upcoming TCEA 2006 conference. Citizen journalism is a disruptive prospect for many organizational leaders. Empowering anyone with access to a computer and the Internet to share their voice on the “global stage” can seem risky as well as dangerous to leaders most comfortable with tightly controlled, top-down styles of management as well as information dissemination.* As I noted in 2005, we’re living in an era where traditional publishing has been disintermediated. This landscape is fraught with risks and dangers, but it is also filled with opportunities. For more on the pros and cons of blogging for teachers, see the point/counterpoint article in the May 2009 issue of ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology, “Is Blogging Worth the Risk?” by James Maxlow and Lisa Nielson. It’s available as a free PDF download for both ISTE members and non-members.

It is impossible for me to think about social media and its potentially transformative potential to permit transparency and more open communication without reflecting on recent events in Iran following their election last week as well as many EduBlogger responses to the election.

On Monday in his post “An Amazing Day”, Jim Gates wrote:

Today was an historic day in the world. The elections in Iran sparked demonstrations by the people there insisting on their freedom. They objected to what they call a fixed election and have, in spite of everything, taken their anger to the streets in incredible numbers. And, they used the social medium of the web to help spread their message…This was a GREAT day to be working with teachers and trying to show them the power of social media, Twitter, specifically. In Tweetdeck I created a Search column for the word Tehran and that’s how I followed the events. There was a hashtag of #iranelections too that I could have chosen to follow. But, the bottom line is that I was following up to the minute reports from the people who were living the event.

Yesterday as well, Shelly Blake-Plock wrote in his post, “This is the Moment: Legitimize Social Media in Education:”

This weekend will go down in history in two ways. First, it will mark — for better or worse depending on the outcome — a fundamental shift in the way the people of Iran are able to express dissent with their government. Second, at least here in the United States, this weekend will mark the moment at which the mainstream media — particularly cable news — was overwhelmed by social media.

It can not be denied. We are all now living in a world of social media. You can’t claim ignorance. You can’t call it a ‘trend’. Whether or not Twitter exists in five years is beside the point. What happened this weekend is that social media became — in the most legitimate way — the voice of the people.

Shelly goes on in his post to exhort educators to take action, along the lines of her guest post here on ISTEconnects, “What Does Internet Blocking Suggest to Students?” He wrote yesterday:

The blocking debate ended this weekend.

Goodbye to the last vestiges of 20th century top-down media. Goodbye to the fear of what humans might produce given the opportunity to work collectively in thought and goodwill. Good morning, humankind.

So teachers, don’t try to teach kids to live in a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Rather, reach out and take hold of the possibilities social media offers. Anyone countering you doesn’t deserve the authority their office holds.

This is the moment. Legitimize social media in education.

When it comes to content filtering and other administrative policies relating to technology and social media, in many contexts we definitely have a strong need to “unmask the digital truth.” What ARE the reasons all blogs and wikis are blocked in many school districts? Why do some organizational leaders resist attempts to embrace social media and blog coverage of conference events as well as organizational meetings?

At NECC 2009 this year, it’s going to be exciting to not only EXPERIENCE the conference, but also SHARE the conference. We are probably only beginning to glimpse the power of social media tools to communicate and amplify ideas as well as conversations. Social media’s potential to provide transparency for a national election or a local school board meeting is largely untouched in many communities, but that reality is changing. Quickly.

We’re living in a “publish at will” digital landscape. What will you share today?!

* I first heard Marco Torres use the phrase “the global stage” at an educational technology conference, when referencing students publishing work online for a worldwide audience.

I have to congratulate Anil and his team for reaching out to a competitor and deciding it was more important to improve upon both of their platforms, instead of just trying to leap ahead of the other for what would be a smaller gain for us, the endusers. Below is Anil’s keynote in four parts; I highly recommend watching it, whether you are a seasoned blogger or just now thinking about joining the blogosphere. Please enjoy, and if you have any questions for Anil you can find him on twitter @anildash or leave a comment on his most recent blog post.

Also check out Shashi Bellamkonda’s blog post that features a 1 on 1 interview with Anil that gives further insight into his announcement. If you want to join some engaging conversations about this you can do so on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb.

That being said, if you’d like to ask these developers about WordPress, blogging, educational technology, or anything else you think they can provide valuable insight on please let me know.  Leave a comment on this post with your questions and I’ll attempt to find the experts that can answer them. I’ll be armed with several Flip minoHD cameras to capture these answers which I will then post for all of you.

Remember, these are the guys that have pioneered the “Web 2.0″ movement and are continuing to create new technologies and philosophies that promote the free distribution of information so there is much we can learn from them. Aaron Brazell is the organizer and heavy lifter of WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. You can read a recent blog post about his experience with organizing WordCamp here.

Last week, Oprah made news worldwide by getting onto Twitter for the first time. Oprah already has over 380,000 followers, and is following 10 people so far. No, sadly she’s not following ISTEconnects or me. YET. ;-)

I’ve noted on ISTEconnects previously that Oprah’s use of Skype as a regular part of her television program is raising awareness about the constructive value of videoconferencing software programs as communications platforms and not simply sources of malware for school networks or tools for Internet predation. (Sadly, school district IT departments frequently promote those views.) This same constructive role is being played by CNN currently. This is a photo of CNN’s use of Skype today in a news report, in which an “expert” was brought in to share ideas and answer questions.

How long will it be before more communications networks in our schools will be opened to permit videoconferencing and micro-blogging with tools like Skype and Twitter? I started the collaborative wiki project “Unmasking the Digital Truth” recently to address that very question. I don’t have a definitive answer to this question for all contexts, but I do think it is important we share and amplify the positive, constructive ways these tools are being used and can be used to support learning inside and outside the classroom if we want to change school policies on things like content filtering.

See Neil Stephenson’s guest post here in ISTEconnects, “The Many Roles of Skype in the Classroom” for more ideas and examples on how desktop videoconferencing can and is being used in schools today. Many of us may have been HBO (“Here before Oprah”) when it comes to both Skype and Twitter, but I’m not among those lamenting her noted arrival. The fact that Oprah as well as CNN are using and promoting tools like these can provide us (as educators and educational change agents) with more openings to discuss the constructive uses of these tools in our schools at PTA meetings, school board meetings, and other gatherings.

Positive, constructive, mainstream awareness of digital communication tools like Twitter and Skype is a good thing, on balance.

CoverItLive is a free tool available for live blogging, providing opportunities for multiple folks to participate in the live blog discussions whether they are attending an event in-person or virtually. CoverItLive allows live-bloggers to insert Ustream or Mogulus webcast streams as well. I have recently used CoverItLive to live blog our state dropout summit, a TechLearning webinar on Web 2.0 in schools, and our most recent school board meeting in my community. Sarah Perez provided a good overview of the functionalities available in with CoverItLive in her January 2008 post, “Live Blogging 2.0.”

I first participated remotely in an educational conference keynote covered via CoverItLive in the most recent Computer Using Educators (CUE) conference in California. I think it would be great if multiple attendees at NECC 2009 would use CoverItLive to provide live-blog coverage of as many sessions at the conference as possible. I’m not suggesting that this type of volunteer, organic live-blogging efforts should be centrally managed or controlled, but I am wondering how live blogging can be best supported and facilitated? It would be great to provide links to live-bogged sessions on a site like NECC Unplugged, as well as posting tweets with the NECC09 hashtag, #necc09. Do you think a common account on CoverItLive should be created and made available to attendees to use when live-blogging NECC sessions, or would it be better for everyone to use their own CoverItLive accounts? Have you participated in or seen a coordinated live-blogging effort at any conferences in the past year, which involved multiple people providing blog coverage via CoverItLive? I’d love to hear and read about others’ experiences with live-blogging at conferences, to get ideas about how live-blogging could be best supported and facilitated at NECC this year.

The Internet and the social web continue to present BIG challenges for traditional, paper-based news organizations. At the end of February 2009, The Rocky Mountain News (the oldest newspaper in the state of Colorado) printed its final edition. “Multi-million dollar annual losses” were cited as the reason to close up shop after a century and a half of operations. We are living in a transitional period of history, when many older adults remain most comfortable with analog (paper-based) texts while many younger people seem more adept and familiar with digital forms. Clay Shirkey reflected on the HUGE costs of traditional printing, which contrast sharply with the costs connected to digital content distribution, writing last month:

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.

If you do NOT obtain your news from a paper-based newspaper, where do you get your news? Television and radio have been news sources for decades and remain important, but the Internet is becoming a more important source for news for more people every day. In December 2008, PEW researchers reported:

The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news. Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

One of my favorite sources for international news is the Global Voices Online blog and network, which features bloggers from around the world writing about events in their nation, state, and local community. The affiliated Rising Voices Project:

… aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities.

How many important voices from history are excluded, misrepresented, or under-represented in the history textbooks in your school? How many important voices are similarly not heard in the nightly television news aired by your regional affiliate stations? Our current transition period from the dominance of media moguls and conglomerates to a much more dispersed and egalitarian access to the means of publication has drawbacks but it also has many benefits. Chief among these benefits is the greater access we can enjoy today to diverse voices and diverse perspectives on a wide variety of issues.

In his April 12, 2009, post, “Reflecting on my Practice,” Neil Stephenson wrote:

Where do my students find themselves in the history that I guide them through? One of the articles that has shed light on these questions was “Silent Voices, silent stories: Japanese Canadians in Social Studies Textbooks,” by Jennifer Tupper (2002). While Tupper’s words could apply to any marginalized group, [she] writes that, “Japanese Canadians almost always appear in history as victims of discrimination, uprooting, incarceration and dispersal. It is as if the history of the persecuted could be reduced to what their persecutors did. We rarely encounter stories of what the persecuted themselves felt, thought, wished to do, and actually did or failed to do; what meaning they attached to their thoughts and actions.”

Digital texts are changing the traditional landscape of journalism in the world, but I think they are also offering more opportunities than ever before for diverse voices to be shared and heard. While many lament the demise of the Rocky Mountain News and deep cuts in staff at other news agencies, I think we can celebrate the availability of diverse voices and perspectives to which we would not have had access in an earlier age.

As Dr Michael Wesch notes in his class video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us …” digital texts ARE different as well as powerful.

Are you encouraging your students to seek information on current events from diverse, digital sources today? Are you teaching students to write and create using hyperlinked writing? Hyperlinked writing is not only the most powerful form or modality of writing today, it is also the most accessible. The digital divide is certainly real and must be addressed. For those with access, however, digital content offers unprecedented opportunities for learning.

The learning revolution is only beginning. Thankfully, we are not relegated in this auspicious time to the role of spectator. It is our choice whether we will simply watch the information landscape change before our very eyes, or we will also participate in this process of transformation. As we write, link, comment, and connect with and to others, we can gain a better understanding of the opportunities as well as pitfalls latent in this dynamic learning landscape.

Image credits:

• Homepage header image:  riklomas
• Top newspaper reader image: Well Tea
• PEW research

..talk for 5 minutes; 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide…..

That presentation model is similar to the Pecha Kucha format. These types of events are not (in my understanding) the same thing as an “unconference,” but they do share similarities in that they can be more organically organized and are participant-led. At EduBloggerCon 2008 there was a session (which I was not able to attend) about different edtech tools that followed a speed dating model: Short, limited amounts of time to share, with lots of participants. These types of learning opportunities at conferences are definitely a move in the right direction, in my view, in our world of social media, user-created content, participatory media, and prosumers. These events challenge some of the assumptions which exist about formal, traditional learning contexts, and encourage both creativity and sharing at levels I don’t think we typically see in “normal” conference presentations.

Last year’s EduBloggerCon was a great time of learning for me personally, but it drew some criticism (some might say a firestorm) from various parties for some good reasons. Laura Deisley provided a visual comparison of EduBloggerCon experiences from 2007 and 2008 in her July 2008 post, “Social Objects at NECC 2008 #1.” Laura wrote:

…in 2008 EduBloggerCon’s viral success meant the scale was different…and the conversation…well…let’s just say “interrupted,” not conversational, and definitely controversial.

Mark Wagner (known to many NECC bloggers’ cafe participants as the DIY jailbreak guru) shared on his blog following EduBloggerCon2008 a sentiment I think many of us felt:

I think every single one of us who attended [EduBloggerCon08] this year were glad that the edubloggercon brought us together, and the event very much owed its existence to Steve. I want to publicly thank Steve for his efforts on this – and the many other projects he donates his time to for the benefit of our community… Participation is absolutely vital to good professional development, and finding innovative ways to tap the creativity of the folks in the room has an even greater impact.

This year, in 2009, we’re looking ahead to EduBloggerCon09. As a community event, I view it as our responsibility to help make it an even bigger success than it’s been in the past. It’s easy to sit by the sidelines and complain. It’s much more challenging to roll up your sleeves, work with others, and figure out how to make something even better. And then deliver. That is what I’d say is our challenge this year for EduBloggerCon09.

Today I had a great phone call with Steve Hargadon, the primary “official” organizer of EduBloggerCon09, as well as Joe Corbett, discussing the event this year and how it can be made even better. EduBloggerCon was a LOT bigger in 2008, and I think it’s safe to bet it will be at least as large if not bigger in 2009. Unlike EduCon and BLC, which have succeeded in providing / encouraging a more intimate/conversational atmosphere (I’m told, I haven’t attended either yet) due at least in part to their smaller sizes, EduBloggerCon can’t and shouldn’t (in my view) become a smaller, more limited event. (In terms of participant numbers) EduBloggerCon needs to be and remain an open event, accessible by “veterans” in EduBlogging spaces as well as complete newcomers. It should be welcoming, it should be diverse, and it should be focused on shared learning.

Steve, Joe and I discussed using the BarCamp model at this year’s EduBloggerCon. I first heard about BarCamp events from James Deaton. According to WikiPedia:

BarCamps are organized and evangelized largely through the web, harnessing what might be called a Web 2.0 communications toolkit. Anyone can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki.
The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. This is a form of the open-space approach and has been dubbed, with another play on words, The Open Grid approach.
While loosely structured, there are rules at BarCamp. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, twittering, wiki-ing, and IRC. This open encouragement to share everything about the event is in deliberate contrast to the “off the record by default” and “no recordings” rules at many private invite-only participant driven conferences

BarCamp events have been held QUITE successfully with over 500 participants. I’m not actually sure what the BarCamp “attendee record” is. The important point in this context is, BarCamp provides an outstanding model for how unconference events like EduBloggerCon can be organized and conducted.

I’d like to invite you to join Steve and I tomorrow (Saturday, April 11, 2009) to discuss these issues and ideas in the Classroom 2.0 LIVE Elluminate room, at 9am Pacific / 10am Mountain / 11am Central / 12pm Eastern / 5pm GMT. Visit Classroom 2.0 Live for more information.

How can we, as a community, make EduBloggerCon09 the best and most valuable learning experience it can be for all participants? Let’s put our heads together on this one. I’m sure we can create a great event at this year’s NECC!