Moving at the Speed of Creativity

www.k12onlineconference.org

Announcing the first annual “K-12 Online 2006″ convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme “Unleashing the Potential.” The K-12 Online 2006 blog has recently gone live! Admission and participation in this event is absolutely FREE!

On the conference blog you will also find the web form we will be using for the submission of proposals. Everyone is encouraged to submit a proposal. The conference blog will be updated regularly with everything you need to know about the events related to this conference. Please be creative and submit suggestions for other ways we can engage in discussions together about these topics!

As the convener of strand 2 during week 2 of the conference, “Overcoming Obstacles,” I encourage you to submit a proposal in this strand! The submission deadline for all abstracts is September 30, 2006. The strand description is:

Tips, ideas and resources on how to deal with issues like: lack of access to tools/computers, filtering, parental/district concerns for online safety, and other IT concerns while trying to focus on best practice in the use of Web 2.0 tools.

For more info, read the full announcement post on the blog and the proposal guidelines. Each week there will be some fireside chats, and we’re hoping to have a culminating 24 hour skypecast that will circle the globe. This is going to a blast and a wonderful opportunity to learn more about web 2.0 as it relates to helping students and teachers more effectively learn and collaborate in the 21st century!
When blogging the K-12 Online conference, please use one or both of the following tags: k12online, k12online06

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Is the Internet good or bad? Should we ban it or embrace it? Is there a place for web 2.0 in our schools? These simplistic questions fail to acknowledge the complex and multifaceted aspects of digital literacy and digital content today. A practical question many people may ask themselves regarding the Internet is, “What constructive role can and should I play in the network economy?” I like Tim-Berner Lee’s recent ideas shared in a BBC interview:

I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don’t like, are problems with humanity.

I also like Tim’s response to a question about validating information on the web. In discussions with educational administrators today regarding WikiPedia, this came up quite a bit (as I hoped it would.) Here’s what Tim said:

When you say there are a lot of lies out there, if you go randomly picking up pieces of paper in the street or leafing through garbage at the garbage dump what are the chances you’ll find something reliable written on the paper that you find there? Very small. When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value?

But when you use the web, you follow links and you should keep bookmarks of the places where following links turns out to be a good idea. When you go to a site and it gives you pointers to places that you find are horrible or unreliable, then don’t go there again.

You see out there right now, for example, when you look at bloggers some of them are very careful. A good blogger when he says that something’s happened will have a point to back, and there’s a certain ethos within the blogging community, you always point to your source, you point all the way back to the original article. If you’re looking at something and you don’t know where it comes from, if there’s no pointer to the source, you can ignore it.

I concur with Tim about this ethos of linking when blogging. A post I have been considering for some time and will hopefully write soon will be titled, “Hypertext writing: Powerful Communication.” I think a case can be made for blogging with hypertext writing as the most powerful communication medium ever conceived in the history of our planet. A bold claim. But I think a justified one. More on this thought later!

The BBC reported yesterday that Google has released a new blog search tool: http://blogsearch.google.com. The tool currently offers two primary sorting options: by “relevance” and by “date.” I don’t think this looks nearly as powerful as Technorati yet, but I’m sure the clever people at Google will continue to improve and tweak the interface and capabilities of this tool.

Nicholas Negroponte is one of my favorite thinkers about digital literacy (as the author of the 1995 book “Being Digital”) as well as a practical evangelist for the transformation of teaching and learning through the lever offered by 1:1 technologies (now via OLPC.) I was delighted to find this evening on the Internet Archive an interview with Dr. Negroponte from 2002, broadcast in two parts. (Part 1 and Part 2) As the founder of the MIT Media Lab, Negroponte has done as much or more than anyone that I have heard of to promote the causes of digital literacy and innovative uses of technology in educational and other contexts. Anyone who helped create Lego Mindstorms is a hero in my book!

This really caught my attention tonight because I was quoting Negroponte in a new article I am finishing for School Library Journal on “The Ethic of Open Digital Content.” I wrote a bit about these ideas in the post, “Open Content and Open Source Tools” a couple of weeks ago. The quotation I’m using is:

The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light. As one industry after another looks at itself in the mirror and asks about its future in a digital world, that future is driven almost 100 percent by the ability of that company’s product or services to be rendered in digital form.

Our future is digital. Are you still teaching analog? Teach digital! (To quote Maria Henderson, who owns the domain name iteachdigital.com!)
As an interesting aside, I learned this summer that John Negroponte is the elder brother of Nicholas. Now those are a pair of amazing siblings!