FETC offered a presentation from Julia Martin attempting to identify how the election of President Biden will impact educators and learners. The presenter made her slide deck available as a pdf. It is available below. The second file is the same pdf with my notes – this is a pdf bundle and I would recommend Skim to read this bundle.

I have signed up for the FETC conference that runs from today for the next four days. This conference when face to face was always our favorite. ISTE was too large and too expensive. It was large, but there had become practical challenges just getting into the sessions you wanted to attend. We had to kind of skip every other sessions if we were interested in back to back sessions because room attendance limits made it impossible to walk from room to room and get in.

FETC is free and online. This means there are no longer challenges watching the sessions that interest you. The downside is that the money to run the conference comes from corporate sponsors and the great majority of the sessions are essentially corporate run. The cost/usefulness tradeoff will likely be a personal issue. I encourage you to quickly join and make your own decision here. I need to do the same. I would rather pay say $25 a day and allow the conference the resources to offer a greater variety of content. However, for the cost I can watch a session or two even if I don’t find the approach to be what I would prefer.

I think our present online necessity offers the opportunity rethink many things. I believe online will become more popular perhaps as a way for K12 schools to share access to a few classes that are not practical for individual districts. Learning online is different and it is likely an acquired skill everyone should experience.

Do give FETC a try and for those working during the live sessions take a look at the archived content.

I happened across this blog post I wrote in 2006. I was and continue to be a champion of the opportunities for participation the Internet has provided. What I failed to anticipate was the rise of social media services such as Facebook and Twitter which make it easy for individuals to participate on a common, easy to use site. I have mixed feelings about the lack of control this requires.

Read/Write Web Under Threat

Is the read/write web moving toward extinction? Lawrence Lessig argues the negative position from his unique legal perspective. His focus typically involves commercial moves to block creative repurposing of content. The example in this article is kids being asked to desist from creating music videos by adding their own art to commercial music. To tell the truth, I can see the position of the music companies – if I can access a music video and I can strip the music why should I not anticipate that the people who invested to produce the music would not object. I assume this is the concern. Should the companies be concerned? I can’t say – the work to create these products would seem to limit how many are actually available, but perhaps the concern is that such student activities will spawn related ventures and where will the line be drawn?

I think the real threat, if threat can be considered the correct word, is that of commercial resources – e.g., blogs, podcasts from CNN, New York Times, etc. Those individuals hoping to “have a voice” and “participate in the dialog” will likely receive less attention. I am not sure this would bother me. I am still of the opinion that we produce content because we value the experience and, if we feel the need, we find ways to generate our own audience – perhaps by interacting with others who value the social experience as much as accessing the content provided by commercial “experts”.