Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

I am becoming convinced that all, or at least most, of the professional development sessions we participate in as educators and share with others should be organized via linked wikis. Dean did a great job modeling this last month in his multi-day digital storytelling workshop. I attempted this in June when I shared several workshops with teachers in College Station, Texas (Bryan ISD) focused on digital literacy– primarily the use of blogs and podcasts to help students develop both traditional and 21st century literacy skills. I started a blogging tools wiki a few weeks ago after an engaging skypecast on this topic, and the MTI 2006 conference I attended 2 weeks ago in Winfield, Kansas utilized a conference wiki that a fair number of folks have contributed to successfully.

So, why all this educational wiki-use? I think the answers are pretty straightforward:

1. Wikis are collaborative, and one of the ideas we want students and teachers to both understand and LIVE is the idea that groups of people can generally come up with better ideas and solutions than people working in isolation.
2. Wikis are iterative, meaning that they improve over time. They are not a single snapshot or a static creation, but rather a dynamic, living creation that can continue to grow as ideas change and evolve over time.
3. Wikis are free. As teachers, we like free stuff. And wikis don’t cost anything to create in our present climate of abundant web 2.0 free tools.
4. Wikis are RSS subscribable, which makes them easier to track and update. More information services in the coming years will embrace RSS for good reason: Pulling information of interest to you is much more preferable than having information PUSHED to you that may or may not be desired.
5. We learn best by experiencing pedagogy and technology: Using wikis permits teachers to take on the role of learners, and directly experience how powerful but yet simple wikis are and can be for instruction– and especially group work.
6. Wikis are fast to create and update. I’ve been making webpages to accompany my educational technology workshops since the mid-1990s, but I’ve never used anything as fast and easy as a wiki. Yes, using a tool like Dreamweaver I can create a website with many more bells and whistles– but our focus in education should generally be more on CONTENT and IDEAS rather than bells and whistles. (Vendors and our own students may lose sight of that idea often, but as the teachers in the room we shouldn’t.)
7. Wikis can emphasize the idea that learning is ongoing rather than one-shot, and enable conversations and idea threads to continue long after the staff development session or group project deadline is over.

I am probably going to create a wiki for all the workshops that I’ll be doing for educators from now on. Thanks to Dean for already modeling this for us with his digital storytelling wiki. I’m guessing Dean and many others will be creating more wikis for use in professional development settings in the months to come! If so, we can look forward to continuing these conversations as we learn and share together.

I love the international idea exchanges that are empowered by the edublogosphere and more broadly by read/write web tools. Not only is it amazing to have the chance to learn from and even collaborate with other educators in other nations, but it is also interesting to observe differences in speech, behavior, and perspectives.

A few weeks ago I participated in an international skypecast about blogging tools, which involved around 25 people (not all educators, incidentally) from different parts of the world. We had North American participants from the US and Canada, and even a couple Australian voices in the dialog.

One issue which came up during our skypecast conversations was whether there are international differences in the ways blogging is being used in the classroom, and which tools are therefore most appropriate for teachers and students to use. In the United States, I perceive we have comparatively more litigation and liability fears/issues in society in general, including in education. I think this can and does have a significant chilling effect on educational innovation in some contexts, and specifically with blogging causes some (or many) administrators to not even consider letting teachers and students under their authority engage in classroom blogging.

Have you observed international differences in the ways web 2.0 tools are used in classrooms, and specifically differences in the uses of blog tools? What are those differences, and what impact do you think they have for student learning and engagement? What should we be learning from other educators in other countries, where the context and environment for education may be different than our own?

Hello from Edmond, Oklahoma, where my family and I have started the rather overwhelming task of sorting out boxes from our previous residence and finding new places for all this “stuff.”

Sorting out your possessions when moving, particularly as we are going from a 4 bedroom to a 3 bedroom home for awhile, is challenging but also worthwhile in many ways. Like our new garage that is filled with boxes, our brains become laden with ideas as we peruse the edublogosphere. Rather than spending time acquiring more “stuff” in the form of ideas, it is often quite helpful to sort through the ideas we already have, organize them, toss out those that are no longer relevant or of interest– and at times, discover lost “nuggets” which we have either forgotten or many not have ever discovered in the first place, even though they were buried somewhere in our mind (or garage.)

Thanks to Dean for giving me an opportunity to guest blog here on “Thoughts and Ideas of an EdTech.” This will give me a good excuse to blog periodically as I’m otherwise occupied at home with REAL boxes to unpack– and also likely provide a good chance to sift through some older posts and thoughts that deserve further attention and reflection.

I’m also planning on delving into Dean’s blog archives– sifting through and holding up some of the many “nuggests” which he has reflected on and posted here. It will be fun to do this together, and I’ll (as always) be inviting your thoughts and feedback as well. Hope you will join me in the upcoming days as Dean takes a well-deserved break from his blog!