Thinking Allowed.

I am at the EARCOS Admin Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.

I have just come out of the room after presenting the I.T. Curriculum 2.0 presentation that Justin and I developed a year ago and its newest iteration.  Was a great turn out and a wonderful conversation.  People offered terrific insight and questions and it is an awesome reminder how smart the people running schools are.  And it’s an honor to start a conversation with them about rethinking how students learn and what they need to learn.

(Click on the Presentations tab to get to my wiki to see notes and resources from the presentation.)

What’s additionally cooler though, is having a colleague like Jeff who live blogged my whole session to his audience and created a back channel conversation on all of those thoughts.  Thanks Jeff.  Check out the unbelievable conversation that happened online, live as I was presenting.  Talk about shared learning!

Next presentation on Tuesday, 13:45 my time which I believe is GMT +8.  Looking for Learning – How supervsiors can foster best practice technology use.  The more I’ve been talking with administrators, the more I see that this is something a lot of schools want to know more about.  I’m excited.

Com’on sing with me now, “message in a bottle…message in a bottle…”

Justin, Kim and I have been invited to join Dave Carpenter and Jeff Utecht for an S.OS. Podcast. The Shift Our Schools podcasts look specifically at how, why and what schools need to do to answer to the shift that is happening in technology, the world, and hopefully in education.

This particular podcast, we will be focusing on the question, “How Do We Connect Technology and Classroom Instruction Seamlessly?”

We’ve presented at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai and ETC in Kuala Lumpur on our work at ISB on moving towards an embedded curriculum focused less on tech skills and more on the 21st Century skills that you read so much about in the edublogosphere. We wrote about our thinking in our blogs and as guest bloggers on Dangerously Irrelevant. We’ve put up our work to share and collaborate with in wikis, initially in newliteracy and then as an ISB21 team.Now we are excited to take questions, speak to solutions, and tackle issues that relate to implementation on these very Big Ideas.

Hope you can come by and tune in.

From their site:

SOS is a biweekly podcast produced by educators in the Asian region discussing the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning. Join us on Ustream.tv for the live broadcast. Listeners will have an opportunity to Skype into the conversation “on the fly” as well as listen to an archived version via iTunes.

It’s a new look for Thinking Allowed (for those 15 regular visitors). No real love for the current theme – simply the old theme was not interacting well with Firefox, which many (most?) of you use. Sidebars were going haywire.

Anyway, let me know what you think of this one. Basically, I like having two columns for the widgets and the text on the left. Maybe I’m a creature of habit – regardless, it limited my choices.

On another note, I haven’t posted in ages – so much for my holiday plans – but I have been out there commenting recently, only I forgot to turn on my CoComment extension, so the comments I made are not appearing on the right in my RSS feed of comments elsewhere.

So, to direct your attention to the posts that drew my attention, check out the post and comments of these two solid posts. In particular, read through the comments (not just because mine is there). Some interesting thinking out there.

• Jeff Utecht’s Thinking Stick post on Interview Questions
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed post on the Curriculum of Politics (which busts into a conversation on media coverage)

Commenting is the stuff that makes the blogsophere work, because it becomes a conversation instead of an article, yet I find often that readers digest a post and leave or even leave a comment without reading the other comments. Not sure why that is.

In a related vein, today, I was talking (in person!) with Jeff and Kim (Always Learning) about how there is a real sense of negativity out there.

Is the holiday season getting on everyone’s nerves?

Is the conversation getting tired and repetitive?

Are techies getting frustrated by lack of action?

Do we need more outside voices, chiming in and questioning?

Is the economy just making us depressed?

No answers, just thinking aloud.

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

Great post on wikipedia from Jeff at Thinking Stick after his presentation on wikis at the ETC conference in Bangkok.

We need to quit looking at Wikipedia as the end result and instead look at it as part of the learning process. Why not go to Wikipedia and use it as a learning device. Use it in our classrooms as part of the learning experience.

I posted on this topic a little while ago as well. In addition to Wikipedia being an incredibly accurate source on the large scale, it is a terrific conversation starter with students about source accuracy, a participatory web, and about collaboration. These are 21st century learning skills that we acknowledge, yet we avoid these conversations every time we block a site (like wikipedia) or deny it’s use by students.

Teachers need to let go of their allegiance to out-dated definitions of “legitimate information” and understand the power of the participatory web (I am trying to avoid web 2.0-jargon). So how do I convince them to do this?

More on Day 2 of Earcos to come…I’ve been doing a lot of “Jukes-ing”.

Great start to the conference.

A student from my school, ISBangkok, gave the first ever student keynote address. As expected, she was incredible, speaking to what it means to be a Global Citizen. She emphasized that it took more than being an international student, but also required breaking down barriers that exist between nationalities within an international school and bringing common experience to all. She likened her journey towards global citizenry to exploration for the New Atlantis. A new world of global awareness and of solving global issues.

Not without intent, this led well into the keynote speaker Jean-Francois Rischard who spoke about topics from his book High Noon: 20 global problems and 20 years to solve them. He spoke to global issues that need to be dealt with AND CAN BE DEALT WITH, but require systemic changes in the way the world can approach them. While his outlook seemed bleak, his solutions were do-able…if only world leaders would listen. At times, I wonder whether world experts can get together and begin to develop solutions without the world leaders’ blessings.

I attended two sessions by Ian Jukes today. He spoke on the exponential times that we live in. Change is inevitable, but more importantly it is nearly incomprehensible. The degree to which access, processing power, information, and bio- and nanotechnology will infuse our lives in the coming (soon) years is crazy.

His best line of the day:

“the difference between science fiction and reality? Science fiction is more believable.”

So what are the implications on our curriculum? What curriculum? Content can no longer be the focus…higher order thinking and communication must be. I worry less about the technology skills of students and more about their ability to use with responsibility, with understanding, and with critical evaluation. We cannot prepare them for the tech. that will exist. But we NEED to prepare them for the thinking that they’ll require.

So when and how can we re-invent schools to focus on thinking skills instead of “content”? Who makes this call and how do they make it with majority teacher, parent, and administrative groups that are stuck in 1960’s educational needs and outcomes?

Good stuff.

Looking forward to hitting Jeff’s workshops in the coming days.

Side note: Have loved this example of Slam Poetry by Taylor Mali, called What a Teacher Makes, since it was shared with me at a workshop last summer. Thanks to Julie Lindsay for finding the YouTube clip and sharing. It is even more powerful as a video clip than in the audio clip format I had. I like it so much, it’s on my sidebar and will stay there a while. Enjoy.

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…