I really don’t want this to come across as snooty, but I have a mini-rant to er, rant. First, let me say that I know I am not even close to being a great presenter, and I’m guilty of some PowerPointlessness from time to time. But I still cannot believe how many technology presenters create PPTs and then do little more than stand behind the lectern and read their slides. Argh. It’s brutal, and it happened in three of the sessions I attended. As far as I’m concerned, if I could have gotten the entire presentation e-mailed to me, then why bother attending? Brutal. That’s another reason I like Lessig so much. He plops one word, maybe two on a slide and develops ideas around them, moving rapid fire at times through the slides. Watch this flash presentation he did. It’s a PowerPoint, but it’s a story. It’s, I think, great teaching to the level of his audience.

Unfortunately, that’s not what I saw today, nor do I see it very often when I go to other conferences. We’re educators. Shouldn’t we do be doing better?

One exception today was a presentation by Jonathan Finkelstein of Learning Times, who actually helped me through the “talk” I did there a couple of months ago on RSS. He showed how New York City schools are using Learning Times to do some awesome professional development.

Another interesting session was given by Milt Dougherty, the superintendent of Little River Schools in Kansas. He gave a pretty empassioned argument for school change…systematic school change. He actually said the phrase “disruptive technology” which, despite the fact that he wasn’t talking about blogs and wikis, makes him ok in my book. He talked about how education has it wrong when it comes to keeping time in class fixed while making achievement variable. The idea that achievement should be fixed and that we should honor the variable time it takes for students to reach those achievement goals is really important. I also liked it when he asked whether or not things would change if we removed the technology from our schools. A lot of schools would hardly miss a beat.

I like it when people make me think.

(Cross posted to ETI.) Ok, so I know I have been on a wiki bender of late, but there’s just so much that interests me about the technology, and I think I’m finally getting my brain around the potential. While wide open wikis may not make it in the classroom, creating sites with logins and passwords makes more and more sense to me. Especially when I see what Lawrence Lessig is doing.

Lessig is one of my few heroes out there right now. I am just in awe of the important changes he is championing regarding copyright and intellectual property. And there is no doubt that he “gets” what’s happening with the Read/Write Web. The concept of putting your work out there to not only share with readers but to invite those readers to help edit and improve the work is pretty amazing. But that’s what he’s doing with his wiki. It’s very cool.

And the other news with Lessig is that he walks his talk. His creation of the Creative Commons was intended to give content creators more power to decide how their content is used. And last week, he wrote on his blog that he will no longer write for the Minnesota Law Review because of their restrictive copyright policy.

But today, on the brink of publication, I had to confront the “Publication Agreement.” In order to give the Minnesota Law Review my work, I have also to give them my copyright. In particular, they get the “exclusive right to authorize the publication, reproduction, and distribution” of my work. They have in turn sold that right to Lexis and Westlaw.

Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:

I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Under that license, Lessig gives others the right “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and “to make derivative works” as long as they give attribution and don’t use it for commercial purposes. The implications of that are pretty profound, and it’s in part the evolution of blogs and wikis and the like that are driving these changes. If you think about this idea just a little, you can’t help but wonder what the shake out will be, in law and in education.
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So I’m back in D.C., this time as a conference participant instead of presenter at the CoSN. The theme of the get together certainly resonates: “Using Technology for Transformation.” I seem to be using the “T” word more and more to describe what’s been happening to the Web and, in turn, what can happen in the classroom. Nothing on the schedule that specifically points to blogs or wikis or the like, but it will be interesting to see what’s discussed in the “Hot Trends in Technology” and “Emerging Technologies: What’s Working? What’s Next?” sessions. Don’t know if I’ll be able to blog some of the sessions, but I’ll definitely share whatever might be relevant later in the day.
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