Tag: necc07

NECC 2007 – Sharing

What is it that prompts individuals to share resources they have had to invest a great deal of time and expertise to create?

Today, I attended a session on the future of the book. While the general opinion appeared to be that the traditional book can no longer serve as the only source of information, there appears to be little consensus on what else should be available and how the development of these other resources should be financed. A teacher who relies on self-generated content was on the panel and presented samples of her materials. She contends that teachers are typically willing to share as long as other teachers reciprocate. I wonder. How many teachers would be willing to participate and how could it be assured that the requires types of content would be created. Can the open source model somehow be adapted to provide the content necessary for K-12 instruction?

The comment on sharing made me think of a session we attended yesterday. Mitchel Resnick from MIT was describing the work being done with Scratch. If you have not been exposed to Scratch, it is a visual environment within which the behavior of objects can be scripted (programmed). Programs are not developed using a language consisting of words, but rather objects. The objects are organized and interrelated by the programmer. The idea is to create a simple way to program that can produce impressive and thus motivating projects. Scratch is a free product. In addition to the software, the creators offer a site participants can use to upload completed projects.

The Scratch team has noticed something interesting about how the site has been used. Students download a project from the site, see how the project was coded, add an improvement of their own, and then upload the improved project back to the site. It is kind of a training ground for open source software developers. Put your project on the site and expect other people to modify your work. Maybe this is not only a way to reintroduce programming into the curriculum, but also a way to develop an appreciation of sharing.

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Roger and HyperStudio Are Back

This is kind of interesting. We happened by the MacKiev booth near the end of the day and stumbled into a presentation by Roger Wagner. Roger was the original developer of HyperStudio. After he sold HyperStudio (the details of why are a little vague), HyperStudio kind of faded. At one point, development ceased.

One of the reason we care personally is that HyperStudio was one of the main examples of a tool students could use for multimedia authoring in editions 2 – 4 in our book. The decline of the product required that we adjust our perspective. We changed over to eZedia products for our present edition. If we move on to another edition, we will probably try to provide examples of both.

While the competition must be tough in creating products for the education market, it is great to see a reasonable level of competition. A little competition pushes companies to continue to generate improved products and gives consumers greater choice to match specialized needs.

If I heard correctly, the upgraded product is to be available for an August release date. Welcome back Roger – good to see you at NECC again.

Roger Wagner

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NECC07 – Be the blogger

It appears that blogs are still in. Will Richardson’s session (webblog-ed) was filled to capacity. Presentation originated from a room offering participants the
opportunity to use refurbished old computers running a stripped down
open source operating system without a harddrive. Folks looking for
ways to contain costs and offer more equipment.

Blogging about blogging (metablogging) seems a little much and since I am assuming there will be 30-40 posts from this venue I will save my battery for another day (post).

Will did identify some wiki sites that he has worked on to offer information and resources related to educational blogging:

http://weblogged.wikispaces.com/Weblogs+in+Schools

http://webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com/

If there was one point from the presentation that I would regard as a kind of core message it was that you must be a participant before being an advocate.

Administrators feel blogs are just too much trouble – be a blogger and explain why this is helpful to you in your own professional development.

Want your students to learn from blogging – be a blogger and show then how.

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NECC07 – Participate from afar

NECC (National Education Computing Conference) 2007 begins today. This has been one of the conferences I have attended consistently over the years. It is what I consider a K-12 educational practitioners conference and a great place for me to keep up on issues and practices. It also has possibly the best vendors area of any conference I have ever attended. The vendor area used to be where I searched for new hardware and software. With Web 2.0 apps and practices the vendor area is probably less important now than it used to be, but I still like to look.

If you don’t or can’t attend, you can follow many things that happen at this conference remotely. The ISTE NECC link provides access to many information sources (podcasts and some live video). Blogs are also a great way to learn what was presented in sessions and typically embedded in the blog entries are links to reosurces provided by the presenters. When I began blogging in 2002, my first series of posts were from the conference that year. It is actually interesting for me to review the posts from the June of each year since then to reread my comments on the conference.

Using blogs to follow conferences has become an organized process. David Warlick created a site called Hitchhikr to organize blog posts from many different educational conferences. I see there are now 1494 posts and the conferences intro keynote is not until this evening. NECC participants have recently been asked to tag posts (necc07). You can easily locate posts with this tag using an aggregator such as Technorati. I have created a watchlist for necc07 and I can watch as the posts role in (now mine among them).

BTW – I checked and it took about 5 minutes for this post to surface through Technorati and my watchlist so you can almost follow events in real time.

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