K12 Open Minds Planet

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The National Education Association just published an article by Cindy Long in their January issue and online about the use of social networking for educators. It's an excellent article (I am biased since since I'm prominently quoted) and it helps to show just how far we have come in thinking about social networking as a positive educational tool.

http://www.nea.org/home/ns/20746.htm

On the Classroom 2.0 LIVE site (http://live.classroom20.com) I've put the show archives for our recent "What We Learned in 2008" year-end wrap-up. Find them at http://live.classroom20.com/show-archive.html. We had over 160 people attend from all over the world!

This coming Saturday, January 10th, Peggy George and Kim Caise will be hosting our first 2009 Classroom 2.0 LIVE web meeting. Classroom 2.0 "LIVE" meetings are an opportunity to gather with other member of the community in real-time events, complete with audio, chat, desktop sharing, and sometimes even video. A Google Calendar of shows (along with other popular ones you might like) is available at http://live.classroom20.com/calendar.html.

The topic this Saturday is: "Tips/Tools for Using and Managing Social Networks." The Newbie Question of the Week will be: "What is a PLN and why do I need one?" (Hint: PLN stands for Personal Learning Network!) The show lasts an hour, and links for more information and logging on are below. The shows are especially beginner-friendly, and if you've never participated in a live web meeting, don't be afraid to come and "lurk." See the website if you want to suggest future show topics!

Date: Saturday, January 10, 2009
Time: 9:00am PST/10:00am MST/11:00am CST/12:00pm EST
Other time zones link, the link to the actual meeting room, and the resource article are at http://live.classroom20.com.

Happy New Year!

Originally published at KatteKrab. Please leave any comments there.

linux.conf.au 2009 starts in a little over 2 weeks in Hobart Tasmania...

Will you be there?

Thanks to Sylvia Martinez for the link to this widget!



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Friday, January 2nd, at 10:00am Pacific / 1:00pm Eastern (link to other time zones).

Peggy George, Kim Caise, and I host the live Classroom 2.0 year-end webcast meeting and show: "What We Learned in 2008."

We hope you will come and tell us all about the new ideas, techniques, tools, books, and conversations around educational technology that made 2008 special for you. (Send your 2008 top-ten lists to live@classroom20.com--we'll post all of them, and even ask some of you to present them on air!) We'll virtually celebrate the growth of Classroom 2.0 this past year, our great hosts, the winning of the 2008 Edublog Award for "best use of a social networking service in education," and more. We'll also get your ideas for what 2009 should bring!

More information and a link to the live show.

Classroom 2.0 has won the 2008 Edublog Award for "best educational use of a social network." I love the honor and feel it speaks highly for the great community that has gathered around Classroom 2.0.

And I want to point out that there are a great number of educational social networks, both for classroom and professional development, that are doing really good work. Check out the other nominees for the award here.  
If you're not a member of Classroom 2.0, I encourage you to join.  
More good links:

• To learn more about usingNing for social networking in education, go to http://education.ning.com.  
  
• Check out (or add yourself) to the list of social networks in education at http://socialnetworksined.wikispaces.com.
  
• Margit Barreras is hosting a new network for homeschoolers using Web 2.0 at www.homeschool20.net.  
  
• The new K12OpenSource.com community is for educators using or wanting to use Open Source Software.
  

Originally published at KatteKrab. Please leave any comments there.

Whilst it's not a holy-day for everyone, Christmas Day is a scheduled public holiday in Australia. For some people that just means time and a half, perhaps triple time for a few.  Nurses, Police officers, system admins - slave on, while others gather with family and friends to share each others company, eat too much food and exchange gifts.

But it's a dark time for some people - everyone else's excess and good fortune is just salt for unspoken wounds. Whatever the faith (or lack there-of) behind your celebration take a moment to think outside your own experience. Hate a little less, criticise not, appreciate another point of view. 

Observe some inner peace, and share tolerance and respect in the closing days of 2008.  The future always seems close at this time of year. Ponder the possibilities for the future you want. Dream a little.

Love. Blessed Be.

Donna

I've become intrigued by the notion that the Web has become an incredible set of "conversations" by virtue of its highly participative nature now with Web 2.0.  
Allison Weiss last week in a phone call said that she wished there was somewhere to go to find out, at any given time, where the conversations that she cares about were taking place on the Web.  This echoed my own wish for a way to search all of the great Ning networks that have been created (see, for example, the list at Social Networks in Education) to find ones that I might be interested in.  Well, once the wheels start spinning in my mind, it's a scary thing!
Below is the widget for searching all Ning networks through Google.  To use others for Blogger, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, and more (and one that searches all of them), please jump over to Conversations.net and then give me some feedback.


SEARCH ALL NING NETWORKS:

I'm watching the tweets today that are expressing regret over proposals not accepted by ISTE for the NECC 2009 Conference in Washington, DC.  To all who wanted to speak on a topic and didn't get accepted:  don't despair!
Last year we held the second formal EduBloggerCon the Saturday before NECC, with the full support of ISTE.  While there are other gatherings of educational bloggers and participative-Web enthusiasts, this is the biggest.  EduBloggerCon 2009 awaits you on Saturday, June 27th.  This is a free event, and is run in "unconference" style to give you the most opportunity to find conversations with others that you care about.
And NECC Unplugged returns!  I believe this event, to ISTE's great credit, is really unprecedented in the ed tech conference world.  This is a wiki-organized event, where anyone who wants to can present on any topic they want to--and the audience determines what they will attend.  The physical space will be in the conference center, and this year should not interfere with the Bloggers Cafe area (smile!).  There will be a plasma display and seating, and we'll be allowing speakers to schedule themselves in during all time slots of the conference.   The website for NECC Unplugged isn't up yet, but I'll post here when you're able to start signing yourself up for sessions.
So even if your proposals didn't get accepted for NECC, I hope you'll still consider attending!  Our goal here is participation, and to explore the topics that weren't recognized by the committees, but which can still be super-valuable.   And let's face it--by the time NECC rolls around in late June, there will be several new ideas and technologies we'll all want to hear about!

This is the letter I just sent to all of my Web 2.0 company contacts.  Feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested in sponsoring the Classroom 2.0 free workshops.

Classroom 2.0 (http://www.classroom20.com) is a social network I started for educators who are using--or are interested in using--Web 2.0 in education.  This past weekend our membership reached 15,000.  It's an amazing network.

As part of the Classroom 2.0 project I hold a series of free two-day workshops for teachers about the use of Web 2.0 (http://workshops.classroom20.com).  I am hoping you will consider being a sponsor.  Sponsorship is not expensive, and the goal is to strengthen our current team of sponsors with additional organizations that have a passion and interest around the historic changes taking place in education because of the read/write Web.  I recently blogged for a Britannica forum on this topic, and links to that blog post and other pertinent ones are at the end of this note.  Web 2.0, I argue, is the future of education. 

This past year we held free workshops in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Houston, San Antonio, Chicago, Palm Springs, and Phoenix.  They have been super-well received, and are unique, dynamic, and fun events.  Each workshop is planned by local participants, using a wiki, and drawing on the expertise of teachers in their area.  This coming year we have plans for workshops in Hawaii, Sacramento, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Vermont, and San Diego.  

The cost of regular sponsorship is $250 per workshop.  You can sponsor just one workshop, or the whole series.  Sponsors are listed on the sponsor page of the workshop website and are given both recognition and thanks at the workshops, but there is no booth or commercial presence like you might find at a traditional conference.  That having been said, sponsors are encouraged to attend and participate in any of the workshops.  The cost is low because the workshop venues are provided by the local organizers, and there are no paid speakers.  Sponsor money is used to pay for my travel expenses and time.  A larger sponsorship offer might allow for an even broader expansion of this program, as we have requests for workshops at many more cities than is possible currently (you can see that list at the website).

I hope you'll consider being a part of this great endeavor.  If it's not your cup of tea, please consider passing this note along to someone you think might be more interested.  In either case, I hope you will join the Classroom 2.0 network.  You can learn more about me at my blog link below.

Steve

Steve Hargadon
Founder, Classroom 2.0
www.stevehargadon.com
steve@hargadon.com
916-899-1400 

Links:
www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/10/moving-toward-web-20-in-k-12-education/
www.stevehargadon.com/2008/03/web-20-is-future-of-education.html/
www.slideshare.net/SteveHargadon/web-20-is-the-future-of-education/

Classroom 2.0 hit 15,000 members this weekend, and Ning in Education hit 3,000.  Both sites, I hope, exemplify the great potential of social networking for professional development in education.
Be sure to check out the 2008 Edublog Awards site, and to vote for Classroom 2.0 or one of the other networks listed there for "Best Educational Use of Social Networking Service."

Peter and I are sitting on the technical committee for ACEC 2010 - the Australian Computers in Education Conference scheduled to take place in Melbourne in April in 2010.  That seems like a long time in the future, but, well it's not really - the organisers would like to open the call for papers in early March!

We've been looking at the following systems:

• Expectnation
• MyReview
• OCS
• OpenConf
• Zookeepr
• Drupalcon
• Eventwax
• Regonline
• Easychair

And are in the process of finalising our feature wishlist.  We'll be seeking expressions of interest in the next weeks for development/hosting.

We'll need call for papers, paper review and speaker management, including speaker profiles, registration and delegate management, delegate experience including links to social networking sites, and session selection. Payment gateway, financial reporting, and export to accounting software...  A Tall order?

Do you have other suggestions?

Acceptance letters are supposed to be going out for NECC presenters this month, so I thought that this would be a good time to make sure we started getting the word out about plans for the conference, which is being held in Washington, DC this summer (June 28 - July 1, 2009)

First and foremost is EduBloggerCon 2009, which will be held on Saturday, June 27, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (where NECC itself will be held). Again, through the generous sponsorship of ISTE, this will be a FREE all-day event for educational bloggers, members of Classroom 2.0, and anyone else who wants to come. We'll have lots of breakout rooms this year, and promise to make it another great event while keeping the spirit of an "un-conference!" Details will be forthcoming on EduBloggerCon.com or stay tuned here or in Classroom 2.0 for information as we have it. Mark your calendars, and make sure others that you know will want to attend are aware of the date, as many folks will start making flight arrangements for their trip soon.

Second is the Open Source Pavilion and Playground Area. In our fourth year now at NECC, with a full schedule of formal and informal sessions coming out soon, it should be really fun to be in Washington, DC this year. With capacity crowds last year for almost every session, and with more and more schools facing budget issues that Open Source addresses very nicely, we're planning for a really fun, busy, and educational time!

Finally, The Bloggers' Cafe. No immediate news right now on the Bloggers' Cafe except that it's on the schedule again, and so, I'm told, is "NECC LIVE," which we inaugurated last year. NECC LIVE is the un-conference within a conference, and we're lobbying for a separate space so the two events have room to breathe. Updated websites for both will be created and posted in the Spring.

Major kudos and thanks to ISTE for all of their support of both the Open Source and Web 2.0 communitites at NECC. Hope to see many of you there!

OK, today I had one of those brainstorm ideas that made me sit up and wonder why I hadn't seen the possibilities before. The talks at the K-12 Open Minds Conference were recorded this year, and a couple of weeks ago I posted the audio on the conference wiki. There were great sessions on Free and Open Source Software: Moodle, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Python, and many more. But it's just the audio recording, and depending on the placement of the mic and the voice level of the speakers, the quality

OK, today I had one of those brainstorm ideas that made me sit up and wonder why I hadn't seen the possibilities before.
The talks at the K-12 Open Minds Conference were recorded this year, and a couple of weeks ago I posted the audio on the conference wiki. There were great sessions on Free and Open Source Software: Moodle, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Python, and many more.
But it's just the audio recording, and depending on the placement of the mic and the voice level of the speakers, the quality varies quite a bit. So I got to thinking--most of the speakers had prepared slide presentations, and probably most of them could still give the same talk right now without much preparation. What if we used my Elluminate office and over the course of a couple of weeks recorded both the audio and the video, and then had a richer library for educators of the talks that were given?
Then I thought: why limit it to just those presentations that were given? What if we not only invited those who presented, but also invited anyone who couldn't make it to the conference and wanted to present? What if we held a virtual K-12 Open Source conference? I know, it's not rocket science, but it's still a dang good idea. We have the audience, we have the presenters--why wait?

By this time, my mind was reeling with the possibilities. An era of budget-cutting, which directly effects the ability for both presenters and audience to attend a physical event, means even more and more folks are going to be interested in Open Source... and need access to a good set of presentations from other educators. If the physical K12OpenMinds conference takes place in the Fall, maybe the virtual conference could take place each Spring.
Look for this in January or February on www.K12OpenSource.com. Oh, I love a good idea.

I just got a call from my primary contact at Ning, letting me know one aspect of the support they've been so generous in giving to educators--the funding me as a consultant--has fallen victim to this economic downturn.
While I am of course, disappointed, it's been a great priviledge and pleasure to represent Ning to educators, and to represent educators to Ning. The build-your-own-social-network model has opened many doors to thinking about professional development and classroom work in the context of social media. I want to say it's been historic. I think it has been. I hope you'll consider leaving a comment here letting Ning know if you feel it's made a difference for you. I'd love to leave them with a parting gift celebrating what they've done.
I will miss the opportunity to get paid to work on something I truly love. Classroom 2.0, which is just about to reach 15,000 members, will stay unchanged as it's never been a part of the work I've done for Ning. It was, however, the impetus for calling Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini last year and suggesting that I could work for them. I felt that CR 2.0 would have a hard time growing and making a real difference for educators if I had to "monetize" it, so working for Ning would be a justification for my keeping it free. That turned out to be a great idea. Because I had paid work to do for Ning, I felt comfortable keeping CR 2.0 open to, and encouraging of, other educators starting their own networks. I believe that was a critical part of the broader adoption of social networking by those who were a part of it, and Ning deserves a lot of credit for that.
If you do a search at Ning.com for networks tagged with "education," there appear to be over 9,000 results. A look at http://socialnetworksined.wikispaces.com shows some of the depth and variety of educational networks that have been created. 15,000 members (almost) in CR 2.0. Over 3,000 members in Ning in Education. Most everyone I know in ed tech has created a network or two or more. Isn't that amazing when you think of how hard it was, even just a few years ago, to imagine social networking as a part of educational practice?
It's been a great ride. No doubt, there is still much fun ahead of us, but I'll miss my formal association with Ning.

There can only be one good reason to ask you to vote for Classroom 2.0 at the 2008 Edublog Awards site:  were we to win again, we'd be introducing more folks to the value of Web 2.0 and social networking in education.  And that, I think, would be a good thing.
But it would also be a good thing to vote for one of the other nominees, so I have mixed feelings.  :)  Please do look over all of the nominees--of the ten, nine are Ning-based networks.  And they are all doing very good and important work using social networking.  Who would have guessed that would be the case two years ago?  Even last year at this time, when Classroom 2.0 won the award in this category and "only" had 4,000 members, seems a long time ago related to our perceptions of social networking for professional development or classroom use.  Today, with 15,000 members (amazing), I still feel that we're only just beginning to understand the power of this technology for good.
So no matter who you vote for, please do vote.  http://edublogawards.com/2008/best-educational-use-of-a-social-networking-service/.  And tell a friend!
There are also a ton of other exemplary social networks being used in education that didn't get nominated, a number of which can be seen at http://socialnetworksined.wikispaces.com (you can add your own networks there as well if you haven't already).  And if you are wanting to use Ning for educational purposes and haven't joined http://education.ning.com, I would encourage you to do so!
Finally, do check out the other categories in the 2008 Edublog Awards:  the main link is http://edublogawards.com/2008.

Originally published at KatteKrab. Please leave any comments there.

Deep into preparations for the Inkscape tutorial I'm giving at linux.conf.au in Hobart in January, I've been practicing techniques and recording them using RecordMyDesktop. It is a Linux application that does exactly what it says, screencast and audio recording of what's happening on screen.  It works very well!

This was inspired by heathenx and rfguerin's fantastic screen casts. They've also followed these up by creating a group on flickr for people to post examples of the work they've done inspired by the screencasts. It's interesting to see how other people express their learning and apply their own creativity and perspective.

But the HeathenX screencasts and other online tutorials make me wonder about the value of a same-time, same-place tutorial in some random room, at some random conference, when one can learn so much from following step-by-step how-to's and watching videos on you tube.

Does the value lie in the quality of the learning environment? Is it the chance to collaborate with peers? We often learn just as much from the questions of fellow learners. During a recent interview Michael Wesch said something along these lines [1]. So I'm looking at resources such as Wikiversity's article on Instructional Design to see if there are tried and true methods I can build on.

I reckon there also has to be shortcuts - most people want to use a tool to accomplish a task, not spend hours scaling the rocky cliffs of the ugly end of the learning curve. So helping beginners get past that stage will be one of the major aims of this tutorial. But I also need to have something there for more experienced users of Inkscape. A couple of gurus and developers who could put my meagre knowledge to shame will be at the conference too, so if they come to heckle, I hope they'll get something out of this too, and perhaps learn something about learning inkscape they can take back to help build the world's best open source scalable vector editor.

Refs:

1. Interview with Michael Wesch

Note: This was posted at http://www.kattekrab.net/ and -fingers crossed- automatically posted back to LiveJournal

I was reminded last night that I have failed to proclaim to the world that video of the November LUV talks is now online - and it is pretty darn good quality.  A huge thanks to Ben Balbo for his efforts in filming, encoding and uploading to BlipTV

So - 1st up was Brianna Laugher - Hacking MediaWiki for Users
and 2nd was Russell Coker - Cloud Computing

Get 'em here: http://www.luv.asn.au/2008/11

I could link direct from here - but then you'd fail to see that the LUV site looks different.  Don't get excited though, this is just a staging post on the way to a glorious new destination and custom theme courtesy of Raena Jackson Armitage and Tim. As it happens, Raena spoke at the LUV December meeting, giving us a sneak peak of her Usability on a Beer Budget talk she's preparing for linux.conf.au - which looks to be a cracker.

Unfortunately, Ben was at OSDC, and we didn't quite pull together the resources to film the December talks - but we're hoping to regularly film our talks starting from Tues 3 Feb next year... So - those attending LCA and hanging about in Oz are very welcome to attend our Linux User Group meeting - all the details will be on the website.