In case anyone is interested, I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Darrel Branson and Tony Richards of the Ed Tech Crew in Australia last week, and they’ve posted the podcast on their site. Enjoy!

It was great fun to take part in a most excellent chat about School 2.0 last night on the WOW 2.0 podcast over at EdTechTalk. Here’s the link to the full hour mp3 which I’ll be listening to so I can hear what I said, and you can read the chat log as well. Looks like we might be doing an encore in a few months…

Technorati Tags: Chris_Lehmann, Steve_Hargadon, education, school20, school_2.0

Another sign of things to come…

K-State plans to have all 6,000 class podcasts available to its students this year, making it by far the education realm’s largest podcasting implementation worldwide.

So does the classroom of the future, even in high school (maybe middle school) have the built in capability for teachers to record and post their lessons?

technorati tags:podcasting, classroom, learning20

From today’s New York Times:

“The scale of N.C.L.B. testing requirements, competitive pressures in the testing industry, a shortage of testing experts, insufficient state resources, tight regulatory deadlines and a lack of meaningful oversight of the sprawling N.C.L.B. testing enterprise are undermining N.C.L.B.’s pursuit of higher academic standards,” he writes. And that is from a man who supports the federal law.

Sounds encouraging, huh?

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So if this isn’t a perfect example of why teachers need to explore these technologies, I don’t know what is. Chris Kenniburg and Jamie Soltis at Long Elementary in Dearborn, MI have combined text, art and audio to create an “ongoing digital storytelling podcast.”

The idea behind the project is to get every grade level at an elementary school to add a new episode (Chapter in the Story) to the podcast by expanding on the previous story submission. The students write and illustrate the next chapter. They then turn to the technology to digitally express themselves creating voiceovers, titles, and animations. These elements are then exported as a �podcast ready� video file to be added to the story. This new �digital book� concept is catching on and the next grade level has begun creating the next chapter in the story. At the end of the year we plan on combining all the video files to create a completed story.

You have got to look at these. Learn from these. Amazingly good work from the kids and the teachers. (Check out the way the pages look…awesome!) They’re just starting, but you can just already tell the type of work these kids are doing. They are writing, planning, collaborating, creating, publishing…all for a real, valuable purpose. To teach what they know and share it with an interested audience. I think if this community started giving out “Best Practice Awards” (hey…there’s an idea…) this would definitely get one.

This is another example of why it’s feeling like momentum is building here. I can only imagine what teachers and kids will do, given the chance…
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The most interesting thing about yesterday’s MassCue Technology Leadership Symposium at least to me, was that two educators came up to me at different times of the day and said the same thing almost verbatim:

I have never seen a technology that has turned my students on more than podcasting.

Seriously…almost verbatim, and kind of out of the blue since I was talking about RSS (though I was hawking my book…I have no shame.) And to both of them I asked why they thought that was. The answer was basically the ease of it, the audience, the ability to hear themselves piping through the speakers wherever they were. And these teachers were downright giddy with the excitement of it all. Very cool.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t “get” podcasting at first, and to be honest, I’m not sure I do still. But that doesn’t much matter, does it? Kids get it, especially elementary kids. And even though it may not be the best tool for conversation (though a blog built around a podcast can help in that) it is a great tool for teaching writing, among other things. That’s the other thing I hear a lot. These kids are really motivated to write and think and prepare these podcasts because they know they are going to be published, that others will hear them. And it’s different strokes with these tools, isn’t it? You don’t like text (like I do) try audio, and if that doesn’t engage you, try video or screencasting or whatever. And there is more to come, don’t forget. We’re only just starting.

Isn’t it cool, however, that in some small measure, the little kids are leading the way???

So it seems the “why” conversation is spreading. I wish I’d seen Nancy McKeand’s post earlier, but as has been the case of late, I’m way behind on my reading and feeling the familiar nose above water feeling. She’s doing a workshop today and asked readers of her blog to chime in with why we use blogs in our classrooms. The answers (11 at this moment) make me feel pretty positive of where we’re at with this. They’re all about conversations and connections, about thinking and learning. And I was struck by how much of what the commenters highlighted was about reading which, as I’ve said many times before, is where blogging must start. That has me especially optimistic.

I’m getting the sense that we are, at last, at a turning point. David Warlick is talking about telling new stories. This morning, I must have spent an hour just wading through a whole bunch of edublogs that I never knew existed, and they all linked to others which linked to others. (BTW, there are a bunch of Australian edublogs that absolutely blew my mind…here’s a thread from just one of them.) In my presentations, people know what blogs are, and what they are really seeking now is pedagogy, not training. It feels like, finally, this is no longer a technology as it is another way to connect and communicate. It’s feeling like in some places, at least, blog thinking is becoming embedded.

Now I know there is still a great deal of blog angst out there. All that MySpace stuff. All the just a new way of doing old stuff, stuff. Heck, I have to admit that when I read that Dave Winer, who is about as close to Adam in the blog world as you’ll find, has given notice that he will soon give up blogging, I was a bit taken aback. Could I give up blogging? Could I just walk away, cold turkey? (This is, after all, some sort of addiction, let’s face it.) I’ve become so intertwined in this space that it’s hard to imagine. And to be clear, even though I have been fortunate to build a comparatively sizeable audience for my ideas through the blog, I still feel like this is my space (two words) to do my thinking and supposing and, ultimately, learning. This process of reading, thinking, writing is how I learn. Sometimes it’s reading, talking, thinking, writing, but it’s almost always learning. I can’t see that stopping at this point.

So maybe it is time to reinvent this conversation. Maybe we’re moving out of the how to and into the why. And when we get down that road a stretch, we’ll get back to the how again, only this time with an eye on best practice teaching and learning. Then it should get really, really fun.

Steve Dembo is noting another way the tools are pushing us to reinvention:

Some professors posting their lectures online as podcasts claim their seeing a rise in absenteeism. Professors are responding by having more pop quizzes or giving extra credit for attending class.

Am I missing something? What’s the problem here? If students can get all of the necessary information and pass the final exam just by listening to the podcasts, then A ) the student should get a cookie and B ) the professor do some serious thinking about how much value there is of hearing the information firsthand.

If the student could just as easily get all the information from a podcast, then isn’t the lecture period being completely wasted?

And then he asks this really big question:

When the lecture, presentation slides and notes can all be shared online, what SHOULD a higher education class look like?

To be honest, I have a secret wish that when my kids get old enough for college (in about 10 years), that they’ll have consumed all of the necessary consumables and just be showing up to classes that focus on actually taking an active role in the learning. What a concept…

But these are old habits. And we’ve got our fair share of ‘em down here in K-12 land as well.

More molecules moving today…sat with a group of World Language teachers and talked and showed them what we could do with audio and podcasting and the like and there were suddenly lots of light bulbs going off. They’re already posting their own files for kids to listen to, but…

“So you mean we can just send the link to the audio file in an e-mail once we post it.” Yep.

“If we wanted to archive them, we can link them from our blogs, right?” Uh-huh.

“What if we wanted to have kids in other schools listen and respond in writing…could we do that?” No problem.

“Could our kids load these files onto their own MP3 players?” Yup.

“So I could have them do something like this on a regular basis, like my kids putting together shows in Spanish, say about our school, that the eighth grade teachers could play and have their kids listen to for the language piece and learn about high school at the same time, right?” Can you say podcasting?

“What if I wanted to have them really talk to someone from far away?” Let me tell you about Skype…

“Wow.” Exactly.

So today’s episode is with Doug Symington (blogger since 2002), an educational designer/technologist in Victoria, BC who responded to my offer last week to add some audio to the post about conferencing with Skype. We chat about Skype as a classroom tool, why so many Canadians seem to be at the cutting edge of these technologies, the and why (or is it if) Tablet PCs are better than Smartboards. I’d meant to get this posted earlier, but it took Ourmedia an interminably long time to make the link appear. (Anyone have a better alternative at this point?) Look for more after the first of the year.

MP3, 19 min

So I’m not sure if this is another podcast, but I’m putting up an interview I did with John Hendron from Goochland, Va. a couple of nights ago. I did it to find out more about how he is implementing blogs at his school and to test out the Gizmo record feature a bit more. WARNING: This is not high quality audio, but hopefully it’s fairly interesting content.

Just as an aside, while I haven’t been a big drinker of the podcasting Kool-Aid in terms of listening to myself ramble on about the state of the education world, the journalist in me loves asking questions. So I’m toying with the idea of doing a series of Terry Gross type interviews with blogging educators, (especially if I can get the Skype record working…) Let me know what you think.

Could it be? A free add on to Skype that lets you record your conversations? It’s an early Christmas present. Only $19.95 to upgrade to the power version which allows you to record conference calls. Hmmm…

I just tried this with a friend and I am now officially one happy camper. I just haven’t been satisfied with the quality of Gizmo and have already removed it from my already cluttered hard drive. And I’ve been thinking about doing more interview type podcasting a la Tim Wilson.

UPDATE: I upgraded to the pro account and recorded a conference call and it’s AWESOME. It’s another step at making it even easier to use recorded conversations as a part of class curricula or to share with other audiences or to archive in your portfolio or… Very, very cool!

So we managed to get all four of the Ed Tech Coast to Coast gang together on one Skype call just over a week ago and the result is now ready for consumption. The file is a bit large due to a change in the production process (Read: Steve took over for Tim W.), but hopefully that won’t be a deterrent. This week, we even have show notes! (Can you tell what we were talking about?) Wow!

As always, feedback appreciated.

There is clearly an interesting point about blogs being ‘inconclusive’ media - blogs as commentary in process rather than finished comments. Such a move is another nail in the coffin of top-down power-full Big Media/Education/Government who depend on fixed narratives, content journies and subject positions. In fact the chain of links that led me to the comment is an example of that inconclusive, media.

But more, this is Derridean ’supplementarity’ - endlessly deferred meanings. This is not a matter of relativistic postmodernism where meaning is without reference or reality, but a far more important issue of destabilising meta-narratives and power positions. The fact that this discourse and its subject positions extends through a range of Blogs, content journies and relationships foregrounds the instability of ‘content’, ‘commentary’ and ‘new media’.

knowledge2go
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Teaching 1.0–information retrieval
Teaching 2.0–information creation

Hmmm…