Dust or Magic 2009

One of the coolest events I get to attend each year is held every November in the little town of Lambertville, New Jersey. The tweets speak for themselves :)

Mobile Learning - mLearn 2009 in Orlando

Here's a convenient way to follow the conversation via twubs:

Games for Change - My First Time

Can games be used to change social behavior? Can games be used to create a shift in people's thinking? How does one go about producing a 'game for change.'

These were some of the questions kicking around in my brain when I walked in through the doors of the Parsons New School of Design in Greenwich village ready for G4C 101.

The G4C 101 workshop was designed to introduce newbies like myself to the entire process of creating a game for change from design and development to pitching and distribution.

I had a little (OK, more than a little) trepidation about entering into a space that was so new to me. I needn't have worried. I've never been in a room where so many people with similar interests in technology, education and design appeared so committed to "change".

I had chosen Youth Empowerment as my 'topic of the day' for the 'grow-a-game' session but something drew me towards the "Global Conflict" group. I had no experience designing a game that explored this topic. My only claim to fame (or shame if you choose to look at it that way) was that I AM a product of Global Conflict!

My story about Sri Lanka for some reason became the 'urge' for the group's game prototype. While if we had just one more hour we could have probably come up with a game that was slightly more defined, "Kandy - the Last Hat Kingdom" ended up winning 3rd place in the pitching session to the judges. Better than, I think, we all expected.

My key take-a-way from the day:

"Designing a game is hard - designing a good game is even harder."

I left the room with a book filled with notes and my head buzzing with ideas...

#G4C09 - The other hash tag for the G4C Conference!

Twitter Stream at Games for Change Conference, 2009

Moving Windmills

I just received this via the UNESCO-OER list serve. He's not a slumdog nor is he a millionaire but he's certainly something...



As Cliff Missen, Director, of the WiderNet Project at the University of Iowa states:

"I love William Kamkwamba's story because it represents the best of what we are trying to accomplish.

The right information in the right hands at the right time makes a world of difference."

A Vision for K-12 Students

If you haven't seen it already, you've got to check out this video. An inspiring and challenging call to educators (and parents) about the need to reach out to children through technology.

FOWA Miami

So I'm going to start back-asswards as my uncle likes to say.

FOWA Miami was pretty cool. Some of the presentations were awesome (Gary Vaynerchuck's was a complete surprise!) and others were a little over my head (as soon as they started throwing out terms like queries and stacks my eyes would glaze over).

So here's a quick recap of what I enjoyed in no particular order

Aza Raskin demoing (eventually!) the Ubiquity plug in from Mozilla - it's in Alpha but I urge all firefox fans out there to download and try this one. It's hard to explain in words but if I had to I'd say it was a really cool way to interact with all of your applications by simply using prompts (I know this sounds like we're going backwards but you have to see the demo to believe me when I say my jaw dropped ever so slightly when I saw this)

The 280North guy demoing Atlas - an amazing way to program rich user interfaces with drag and drop functionality. Again, you have to watch the demo to believe this but I think EVERYONE (even those jaded- too- cool- to- smile- developers) dropped their jaws. Spontaneous clapping erupted and they deserved it. Did we just witness a milestone making moment in history? I guess time will tell.

Kristin Halvorson from BrainTraffic ending her talk 15 mins early so she could ask "Why am I the only woman on the program?" The few of us in the audience (maybe 15% but I could be wrong) clapped. It was a difficult conversation and I could feel the bristling of some in the room but Ryan Carson and Chris Messina handled it rather well and asked the audience to help by proposing possible women speakers via twitter (#FOWASPEAK). I just sent a tweet with the URL to the article by Fast Company this past month on the most influential women in technology.

OK, it's past midnight and I think I'm running out of steam and even though I'd love to cover how all of this relates to education and kids I think I'm going to have to call it a night. I'll save some juice so I can write more quotable quotes from Jason Fried of 37signals and Gary Vaynerchuk in my next post.

Conferenced Out

In the past seven days I've been to three conferences and it shows. My boss asked me to stop with the ideas yesterday, so it must be pretty bad! :)

I meant to blog about all of them live but while I'm an excellent multi-tasker visually, I have a hard time doing multi-sensory multi-tasking (like listening and blogging at the same time). Besides, I like to be able to consolidate my notes (yes, I still use a notebook and pen).

The three conferences that I went to

• Mobile Learning 2009 - Washington, DC (my first mobile learning conference)
• Barcamp / WordCamp Miami - Coconut Grove, Fl (my first unconference)
  
• Future of Web Apps (FOWA) - Miami, Fl

I'd love to go to SXSW but don't think I can justify that one with management right now :) Maybe next year.

I'm going to try to write up what wowed me most from each of them and what impact (if any) it may have on education, for the two and half people that actually read my blog. That would include you, Ma.

Mobile Learning Conference 2009

I'm looking forward to attending the Mobile Learning Conference in DC next week. They've got some interesting speakers lined up including:

Marc Prensky
Founder and CEO, Games2Train
If you haven't read his book, "Don't bother me mom, I'm learning" you should! Quite a thought provoking and entertaining read.

Dr. Elliot Soloway
Professor, University of Michigan (I've used his name several times in the papers I wrote in graduate school so I think it'll be cool to finally meet him - yes, I'm a geek!)

Alec Ross
Former member of the Obama Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Team (he'll be giving the lunch key note speech)

I'll be twittering from there and I'll do my best to update my blog with some good tidbits of information.

I'm particularly interested in seeing if there are any solutions involving Flash based content on hand held devices as well as what mobile learning can mean for developing countries like Sri Lanka. This is a completely new field for me so I'm sure I'll learn a lot and meet some cool people.

Gates Foundation to Start Web Site for Teachers

In his first "annual letter" Bill Gates has stated that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is planning on creating videos of exemplary teachers and then uploading them online in the hopes of inspiring other teachers and helping students learn.

In his letter he describes his motivation for creating this site:

"Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving. So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students."

I think this site can have a great impact on not just teachers but parents who help their kids with home work and those who are homeschooling their children as well. While many homeschoolers do attend conferences and actively participate in forums online I believe watching a great teacher in action can be even more illuminating. It’s the whole Albert Bandura thing, you know.

Good on you, Gates Foundation. Now when can we see this website?

Will Right Brainers Rule the Future?

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink Of all the non-fiction books I read last year (and I’m a geek so I tend to read many!) this one ‘stayed’ with me enough to tell others about it. It is a provocative little book and it uses the metaphor of the two sides of our brain to make some very compelling arguments. “Lawyers. Accountants. Computer programmers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities - inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.” Pink talks about 6 kinds of “senses” that will predicate our professional and personal success - design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. He sees these skills as essential in the new economy. I won’t go into what each of them are here, but I believe the ideas are definitely worth exploring. While I can see many disagreeing with some of his premises, there is no denying some of the research that he cites in the book. While I believe this was probably aimed at a business audience initially, I believe teachers and parents can find some valuable insights in this book. For parents who are homeschooling their children or who have children who are gifted and/or just don’t ‘fit’ the current classroom and are having behavioral issues, I urge you to add this to your reading list.

Shift Happens

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a billion…

Here’s a video that every student, teacher or education-in-training should watch.

The video makes a compelling argument as to how the world is changing by pointing out some startling facts about children, education by making comparisons with countries like India and China. The video is visually delightful way and while it is rather long (for a YouTube video!) it DOES hold your attention.

I showed this recently to a class of undergraduates – freshmen who have grown up with technology but also some older adult students who are looking for a change in vocation. I think the few minutes it took to show the video made more of an impact than the whole hour I took explaining why educational technology is going to be an integral part of educating digital natives.

I just found a comment from a student to a similar video (there are actually tons of derivative works from the original Shift Happens video) that said something to the effect that “my teacher showed this in history class about the only thing worth while that i learned in hs”

I often like to read about the inspiration for things so for those of you who are interested here is a post to Karl Fisch’s blog - the fischbowl (the original creator of the powerpoint called Shift Happens

So as we witnessed last week, Shift IS happening – the question is how are we getting ready for it?

I'm back...

My friend says I'm like a crab in a barrel...going in so many different directions and yet going no where. So one of my resolutions this year is to just focus on a few things. One of them is writing. And that includes updating my blogs. Of course in an effort to write something meaningful, which I realize is impossible if you're trying to update many blogs I'm only going to update the ones I truly care about. It's hard to pick but this one was 'it'. Let's see how long I can stick with it!