ACTEM Conference - Will Richardson's Follow Up Session

The Search

A book I finished recently that seems to keep coming up in conversataion is
The Search by John Battelle. It not only covers Google extensively, (up to 2005) but starts where search begins and discusses the two elements of search that are so obvious to us now, but where not at its inceptio: Discovery and Recovery.

Think about it, on the web we know the amount of info is too much to categorize, so we use search to find what we're looking for, while on our own machines we recover work (usually called Find) and pull up something we have already done. These two model are converging now with Google's Web History feature. (www.google.com/history) They record every site you've been on. Privacy issues are a huge concern with this ability to track your 'click stream.' But I have to admit - it's very useful. When I want to find that page I didn't bookmark or otherwise note, this is the easiest way to go back in time and recover it.

All these implications are discussed in The Search. It gets a little heavy with the geek speak at times, but overall a great read (listen) on something that we all use everyday.

ACTEM 2007 Conference - Will Richardson

Will Richardson's keynote presentation at the 2007 ACTEM state conference.



To view the video in full screen [Link]. (Please note the quality level is set for web streaming, for a higher quality video or DVD please contact kkelley@msad48.org) Download the video for an iPod. For more information on how to put video on an iPod click here.

Bob Sprankle also podcast an audio only version of the keynote here.

Videos

The folks at Digital Ethnography do it again! After the terrific video The Machine is Us/ing from Kansas State University. Here's two new videos:

A Vision of Students Today

and Information R/evolution

Post ACTEM Conference

This year's ACTEM conference is over I've been mulling over how to recap. Will Richardson did a spot on keynote (our broadcasting students recorded it and will be posting as soon as we're back on Monday.) And I got to see the Bit-by-Bit team in action. What a treat. I also did a session of my own on the Virtual Classroom (That I embarrassingly didn't realize I was going to be doing.) I hope the participants got something from it. As soon as it was over, I started thinking of all that I should have said. Oh well.



Student following the projected webpage from Will Richardson's Keynote on his iPhone.

Overall it was a great time for Maine educators, but I still have that lingering feeling of the 'preaching to the choir' phenomenon. The sticking question for me was, "Ok, how do we get those educators not here that are not interested - well, interested?" The response of, "They just have to be." doesn't satisfy me. Obviously they don't 'have to be' because they aren't. How much of what's shared at this conference gets back to the kids. I mean really back to the kids. How many of us go back on Monday, jazzed by what we learned, and are able to get that through to those who are decidedly not on the 'Tech Scene?' Certainly every bit helps and I really do feel there were some amazing ideas being tossed around, but I like to know that the connection is being made beyond the Civic Center. I guess for me, I'll pull out my recurring mantra of, 'Have the students do it.' Meaning, have students participate in the experience, make them be part of the solution and bring others along in the process.

ACTEM Conference

The ACTEM Conference is coming next week, October 11th and 12th, and I'm bringing some of our broadcasting students to record the keynote speaker Will Richardson as well as many of the sessions as we can.

I'll also have the students interviewing participants much like we did at Alan November's Building Learning Communities conference this summer. That was a fantastic experience where our students rubbed elbows and interview many of the movers and shakers of the educational technology community like Marcos Torres, Marc Prensky, Chris Lehmann, etc. (Check out some of the interviews here.)

Also, here's the keynote presentations from the 2006 ACTEM conference.

Angus King Award Presentation




David Warlick Keynote Presentation

K12 Online Conference 2007

The K12 Online Conference 2007 is almost here. It runs from October 8th to the 27th. Go to k12onlineconference.org for more details. Here's a quick explanation from the website:

"The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference run by volunteers and open to everyone."

You can click here for a flyer or listen to a terrific interview by Bob Sprankle, Cheryl Oakes and Alice Barr with a couple of the conferences organizers, Wes Fryer and Darren Kuropatwa.
Check out podcast #24 at: www.bobsprankle.com