Thinking Allowed.

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This post has been a long time coming.

For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the ever-growing need for visual literacy in our off- and on-line worlds. This is not ground-breaking stuff…the sense/need for learners to gain visual literacy has been around for a while – even pre-Web.

People have been studying and manipulating how the eye moves over a page of text (see any speed reader) or scans an advertisement (see any cigarette ad in the past 10 years) or views a web page (see any basic web design course) for quite some time now.

For the most part, it is humanity’s top sense and so our brains are wired to interpret a visual world.

More recently, though, I have been struck by how effective tag clouds have become as a visual representation of popularity or importance. (In today’s web is there a difference? But that’s another post) I remember the first time I saw a tag cloud and thought, “wow, that makes so much sense.”

Does it makes sense because the human brain builds understanding in visual ways (seeing is believing) or is it because I have become so visually sensitive from years of doing this ed tech stuff?

Does it matter?

Ultimately, our learners live in this world. So do we.

This world is requiring of them (us) a sophisticated visual literacy that reaches beyond the “scanning of a page” to understanding visual cues, reading iconography in an instant, and deciphering intent and meaning from intentional layout and design.

A month or so ago, I was on the TED Talks site. Terrific stuff, most of you reading this have been there, seen the videos, bought into the messages.

But have you checked out their homepage? Have you seen how they handle communicating popularity? Or currency?

Squares of various video moments grow or shrink depending on what criteria you click on the left. You want most recently updated? Click that and the videos change size to reflect your choice. Watch them change when you click most talks or most discussed or most emailed.

Awesome.

Don’t trust my little explanation…check it out. View the videos later. For now, learn from how they use visuals to communicate.

A kind of dynamic image cloud - always changing, always user-driven.

That thinking got me thinking, “what if you kept notes that way?”

What if students people became so visually-tuned that they organized thought that way?

Maybe we already do. In which case, what if note-taking matched that visual style?

I’ve always been an “outline” note-taker. You know the type…make a point, related points get indented underneath that point. New points get outdented (I love that that’s become a word). You’ve seen this form of note-taking or done it or taught it.

And that form works. You can study from it. You can remember how points relate and there is a flow to your notes that reflect the chronological time spent listening.

But what if a more visual style fostered better understanding?

I decided to play with the idea.

At the Learning 2.0 conference, I used Smart Notebook software (typically used for presentations on Smart Boards) to take notes in each of the sessions I attended. (They were awesome by the way) I chose this software, because it allows for quick typing and then instantly moving the text object anywhere on the page. Resizing is a click and a drag of the mouse and font color changes are no more than a highlight and click away. Add to that the ease of adding new “slides” (one click) and re-ordering them if needed. The ease of layout manipulation and simplicity of tools made this an easy choice over Word, Photoshop or any other software I had on my computer.

Did it work?

That’s a little harder to say definitively.

All note-taking is subject to personal taste and recall. It’s intent is recall for the note-taker, rarely for someone else. It’s why supplying the notes on the conference Ning was helpful for others, but still NOT like being at the session.

I’ve shared one example from a session I attended given by Alan November. At times I added my own questions in among the notes, emphasizing them with white space, color, size, or alignment.

Have a look…the slides lose a little impact in the export/translation to PowerPoint and then to Slideshare (not to mention the size factor is lost). But you get the general idea. “Order of slides” still handles general flow of the session, but the freedom to go back, add comments and manipulate layout to reflect thought processes was pretty interesting.

(And I wasn’t playing so much with it that I was missing out on what the speakers were talking about.)

[slideshare id=121963&doc=november-teaching-and-learning3188&w=425]

I was putting thoughts to screen in a way that was reflective of how they were being formed in my mind.

That’s pretty cool.

Maybe it’s not the way to teach note-taking to children. Maybe it’s too wishy-washy or hippy or crunchy or new agey or Web 2.0-ey. Maybe children need help organizing their thoughts rather than fostering “cloud” thinking.

But given the visual literacy requirements of the now and the future, we are obligated to show students tag clouds and sites with visual components like TED talks.

We NEED to talk to them about visual literacy and making meaning from color and alignment and layout and design.

And then, we need to ASK THEM to explain to us how they see the world and how they make meaning from what they see.

Because I bet that’s pretty cool too.

And I don’t think we ask them enough.

Technorati Tags: learn2cn visualliteracy novemberlearning tagclouds TEDtalk

And many of them were in Shanghai this past weekend.

Having returned from the Learning 2.0 Conference hosted in Shanghai, China, I am still feeling the exhaustion/elation of a conference in which my thinking was constantly challenged, stretched, and inspired.

Thinking allowed?

Try thinking expected.

It’s not often that you attend a conference that is truly up your alley - where EVERY session has more than one workshop you wish you could attend. Where you can’t even attend your colleagues’ presentations for support, because you don’t want to miss out on learning something new or being inspired by someone else. (Plus your colleague needs you to go elsewhere, since he/she is missing a session due to presenting!)

Learning 2.0 was one of those.

Learning 2.0 was one of a kind.

(Maybe that’s not fair, I haven’t been to EVERY conference.)

I’ll end the superlatives here, because it won’t take long to do a search of the ed blog world to find others out there celebrating this event. Kudos to the organizers. You didn’t do it for the kudos, but kudos nonetheless.

So on to the details.

Reminded of what matters by McKenzie.

Inspired by Richardson.

Thought-provoked by November.

Reflective with Nussbaum-Beach.

Bummed that I missed any sessions with Fryer.

Had a blast with all of the participants. Ed Tech Geeks, the lot of us. And it was great!

I experimented with different, very-visual way to take notes at each of the sessions, which I will share next post.

Justin and I presented our new literacy curriculum, which we called Curriculum 2.0, which I wrote about in my last post.

More on this to come.

In the meantime, thanks to all who made the Learning 2.0 Conference such a positive experience.

Technorati Tags: learn2cn curriculum2.0 fryer richardson mckenzie nussbaum-beach november edtech learning2.0

It is getting close to the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai and I am becoming more and more excited to present the work that Justin and I have done in preparing what we believe is a new and better way to approach technology learning in schools - Curriculum 2.0.

Better?

Better than what?

Better than the incredibly thorough, but utterly oppressive I.T. scope and sequences or standards (or some other s-word) that have been the norm at schools.

Better than these documents that - rather than making technology integration accessible - serve to intimidate teachers and foster the counter-productive notion that talking about technology is for tech geeks and experts, thus eliminating it from the classroom.

Better than what we’ve done before and seen fail.

At least we think so.

Here’s the blurb on our workshop in Session 8, Sunday at 10:15 am (I’m not listed in the real program):

Information Technology Curriculum 2.0
By Justin Medved (and Dennis Harter)
At ISB, we believe that technology is a tool for learning. We believe that technology is used as a tool outside of formal schooling for communication, collaboration, understanding, and accessing knowledge. It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology. At ISB we believe we must focus on the higher-order skills that are necessary for success in the 21st Century. These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather provide students with the opportunity to succeed no matter what their futures hold. In this session we will share our curriculum model and our implementation plan for the next three years.
Room: C-228

It’s a work in progress, but it’s progress that we focus on.

We’d love your feedback, so if you are going to be there, hopefully you’ll attend and give us your thoughts.

If you are coming to Shanghai, introduce yourself here and we’ll meet again in a few days!

Looking forward to it.

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Technorati Tags: learn2cn curriculum2.0

This weekend is the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai, China. Featured speakers include: Alan November, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Will Richardson, Jamie McKenzie, Gary Stager, Wes Fryer and Chris Smith.

Are you kidding me?! That’s like a who’s who of Ed Tech RSS feeds! And as exciting as that line-up is, also attending are Always Learning’s Kim Cofino and Medagogy’s Justin Medved (then again I work at the same school - so I see them regularly) and Thinking Stick’s Jeff Utecht (one of our hosts).

How can I not be psyched?!

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT: Justin and I are presenting one session on our ideas for embedding the new literacy we all talk about into school life and curriculum. We believe that our approach may give it a chance to be successful finally. We’ve seen too many IT scope and sequence documents fail. Our approach, we believe, makes all of this accessible to teachers and their buy-in ultimately seems to determine the success of a program. If you are at the conference we hope to see you there in room C-228, for Session 8.

We are hoping that the minds of fellow Ed Tech people will help us frame our work and improve it as we go. The collaboration in our jobs is just so great.

Can’t wait…it’s going to be fun.

So, sometimes you’re at a conference and maybe you don’t make it to a workshop…

All right, so I didn’t attend any sessions on Saturday. It was a family-day. The kids had not seen me much for the past few days. We did bring the kids by the hotel to visit with friends and then we spent the day with them in town. So I wasn’t any “brighter” at the end of the day…maybe I was a little workshopped out, but mostly, I just needed some time with the little ones.

My wife and I did attend the final dinner event though and had a great time. A lot of people don’t like those events, but for me it was a wonderful chance to catch up with many friends dotted all over Asia now, whom I’ve come to know after 15 years working in the region. It was fun to run into an old math colleague and then, together, meet former students who have now become teachers. It turned into a nice debate on who was the “greatest math teacher ever”. Ahhh…how impressionable young minds are … Actually, it was terrific to see former students choose international teaching.

One of the added pluses, as well, was that after continually missing each other, Jeff Utecht and I managed to find each other and talk over a beer. He is as engaging in person as he presents himself online and it was great to share experiences and thoughts on change in schools. Shanghai is lucky to have him and I can’t imagine a school that wouldn’t bend over backwards to get him should he ever try to leave (cough, cough, I.S. Bangkok, cough, cough). He works too hard though and, as my wife suggested, he must have a very patient wife.

Earcos was a terrific experience. One that I had been ducking in recent years. It was a good learning weekend, but also it was a great networking event. Touching base with old friends and meeting new ones is an important part of conferences like this. I am glad that I went.

KL in ‘08 or bust!

photo by mattlogelin

Day 2 of the conference brought us another wonderful student keynote who spoke on the Chinese tale of the Frog in the Well. The frog only has a limited view of the sky through the top of the well, and until she is moved and shown the true nature of things, her horizons and her perspective are never changed. A fine start to the day for teachers to think about and to consider international education.

Then, the ever dynamic, Ian Jukes came on to speak. With excellent supporting visuals, Ian spoke on the dire need for our schools to address the thinking skills needed to prepare students for the world that outside of education has changed and continues to change so rapidly. Great quote from Woodrow Wilson, “it’s easier to move a cemetery, than it is to change a curriculum.” He makes a terrific point that the main difficulty is that the change we are dealing with is hard to comprehend and so it is hard to make our own changes when we are dealing with the “tyranny of the urgent.”

Kids today are different - Jukes spoke on how the visual cortex of the brain is larger, more developed than kids of 20 years ago. “Screenagers”, he called them, citing two Time Magazine articles. Interestingly, he talked about how current research seems to indicate that our brains continue to adapt and make new connections. But the brain needs regular exposure to the “change-maker” to make this change. So does this have implications on our schools? (rhetorical)

Jukes talked a fair amount on games and their impact on kids. He encouraged us to learn about these games, to play them with kids and to get our “asses kicked” by kids. They are hard-wiring themselves through these technologies. We should need to tap into this.

I saw a lot of Ian Jukes this week. And the message is clear. Change is here…change is fast (exponential) and getting faster. And predicting the future? Impossible. So what does that mean for us? It means that we need schools to be different. I haven’t had “my own” class in a few years now and I do think about how I would do things differently if I were in the classroom again. But my need for change in education is even greater now. As the tech-guy, this stuff seems to fall under my umbrella for change. And I need to work out how to convince a curriculum office to dump content and adopt thinking skills, a faculty to include me in their lesson planning, and an administration to hire and evaluate based on a willingness to adapt to these ideas and change the way schools work.

Is this overstepping my bounds? Probably. But the need seems to strong to ignore. Education really seems to be failing kids. They seem to be learning in spite of us, not with us. Maybe that’s too harsh, but I liken it to the exact opposite of wikipedia. Wikipedia is accurate at the macro-level, but could be inaccurate at the micro. I think real learning is possibly working in individual rooms with individual teachers, but we are failing miserably on the school-wide education-as-a-whole level in preparing kids for futures requiring 21st century skills. (speaking of which, I attended a workshop on these skills that set us back on moving forward more than anything I’ve seen….good presentation is good presentation and when it isn’t good…ouch. Until I get up and start presenting myself in that forum, I suppose I should not judge).

Luckily, I am spoiled. I work with a forward thinking leader colleague and am about to be joined by another in the ES. I saw many faces from my school at the various Jukes sessions. The tide could start changing at ISB and I think that those who are interested is as good a place to start as any. Let’s see how many come to school on Monday wanting to be committed.

I will be attending the EARCOS ETC conference in Bangkok, starting tomorrow and running through the weekend. This year there seems to be a focus on technology as there are a bunch of quality presentations going on regarding 21st century learning skills and other tech-focused subjects. Ian Jukes is one of the keynote speakers and I will also be attending a pre-conference session with him.

The hard part this year is going to be choosing which session to go to when multiple ‘interesting’ sessions happen at the same time. I will try to blog about some of the thoughts that come out of this conference, as I am sure that Jeff Utecht, from Thinking Stick will do as well (he is also presenting).

One cool random fact about the conference…my wife designed the “cover” art. She’ll probably kill me for telling people, but I’m very proud, she’s got a great sense of design.

Posts on the ETC conference to come…

(originally posted on harterlearning on Feb 4, 2007)

Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us at The Thinking Stick

Over at Thinking Stick, Jeff posted the great video by mwesch in the above post. It also allowed me to work out how to add YouTube to my own blog, which was an added bonus. I’ve added it above. It is a response to Jeff’s own YouTube video explaining Web 2.0. Thanks to Jeff for finding this one and of course, thanks to mwesch for making it and sharing it with us all.