Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Oh my gosh. These are hilarious. If you are not a big Star Wars fan and didn’t grow up on the series, you might not think so… but I do!

This podcast is a recording of my keynote address on Digital Storytelling in the Classroom at the 2006 Hawaii Library Association’s annual conference in Honolulu. In the address, I discussed the connections digital storytelling has to literacy development and the roles of school librarians, shared several examples of exemplary student and teacher-created digital stories, and invited audience members to engage themselves and their students in digital storytelling projects in the weeks and months ahead.

Show notes for this podcast include:

1. My online curriculum for digital storytelling workshops
2. Hawaii Island Movie Contest Winners
3. Center for Digital Storytelling Examples
4. Apple iLife Contest Award Winners
5. My Digital Storytelling social bookmarks

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 Podcast103: Digital Storytelling in the Classroom [33:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1994)

We’re icebound in northern Oklahoma City (Edmond where I live) with snow expected later today. Winter is falling!

The local weather and news people live for days like this I think. It’s like we’ve had a hurricane and the news reporters are on the coastline reporting as it makes landfall, or there is a war and the reporters are on the front lines.

Schools all around us are cancelled. It’s a snow day! More accurately, it’s an “ice day,” because the conditions outside are NOT good for playing and making anything– If the ice keeps falling like it is now, I may be able to get out my hockey skates and skate all the way to WalMart about a mile away! (Thankfully we did shop and WalMart last night and stock up!)

Yesterday I was driving with one of our account managers to visit some schools in south-central Oklahoma, and we had a very interesting experience. The cold front had passed through Oklahoma City, so as we drove south we left the cold air and entered the warm air front. The temperature differential was very steep, around 30-40 degrees fahrenheit. At one point, the car suddenly (like in the time it takes you to snap your fingers) completely fogged over. The windshield wipers cleared the fog / condensation from the windshield — but the fog on the other windows remained. It was a really amazing experience!

Thankfully we still have electricity. Because of all the ice and continuing ice that continues to fall from the sky, it’s likely some power lines may snap. We have a good stockpile of wood at the house for wood fires if needed (and wanted), but unfortunately our camping equipment is in our popup trailer a good distance away from our home. (including our stoves.)

So for now, we’re on the Internet and I can work electronically from home. I’m sure my son and I will be taking quite a few pictures of the winter wonderland (esp once the snow starts here, which is supposed to be later today– lots of the communities around us already have snow) and post them to Flickr soon.

Winter in Oklahoma is already a lot different than winter weather in Lubbock!

The latest (December 2006) issue of Wired magazine has several excellent articles that relate to YouTube, IPTV, the rapidly changing landscape of paid advertising, and new media technology use in general– but especially by younger demographic folks. The three articles are part of a series titled “Web Video Grows Up,” and includes “The YouTube Effect,” “Commercial Break,” and “The Secret World of Lonelygirl15.”

The Secret World of Lonelygirl15 describes how YouTube has become an entirely new medium for filmmaking and digital storytelling. I had not previously heard of “Lonelygirl15″ and the controversy surrounding this fictious YouTube video series, which perhaps shows how out of touch I have been with developments related to YouTube until relatively recently. (As an aside, isn’t it amazing how fast things change… If you tune out of conversations or for some reason just don’t “hear about” something like this, you sort of feel like Rip Van Winkle…..)

A small team (like 3 people) got together with the idea of creating an Internet video series that would take advantage of the power of viral video. After posting the scripted segment of the fictious Lonelygirl15 video series on YouTube titled “My Parents Suck…” the video was seen over half a million times in less than 48 hours. According to the Wired article:

In response to the feedback, Beckett and Flinders [the producers and filmakers of the series] decided to focus on the tension between Bree and Daniel. When viewers suggested that he had a crush on Bree, they changed the story line to include a romance. That couldn’t have happened on television. A conventional TV episode airs once at a certain time; even if it’s great, it can only serve to attract viewers to future episodes. On YouTube, a video can be streamed at any time. The good ones are watched again and again, sending a clear message about what works and what doesn’t. When “My Parents Suck …” broke 500,000 views, Beckett and Flinders realized this wasn’t just an experiment or a setup for a film. It was a medium in its own right. The team decided that Lonelygirl15 shouldn’t leave the Internet. She had been born there, and she would stay there.

So, if you have not heard of the Lonelygirl15 series, go read the Wired article about it. It also includes direct embedded links to many of the series’ episodes. To learn more, a simple Google keyword search for “lonelygirl15″ turns up 1.8 million hits including the www.lonelygirl15.com “tribute site,” the lonelygir15 YouTube site, the WikiPedia entry for Lonelygirl15, and the lonelygirl15 myspace page.

Note that I am NOT endorsing the content of these sites. I think the story of what has happened in terms of digital storytelling and media publication because of sites like YouTube and increasing residential broadband Internet access is significant, however, and worth studying to understand these trends as well as the challenges and opportunities they present for educators, parents, and others.

I’ve also read The YouTube Effect article, but I’ll save my comments on that for a later post.

Technorati Tags: lonelygirl15, puppy

I created a very simple, two page PDF “Quickstart Guide to Audacity” for my podcasting workshop last night. I continue to tweak the online curriculum for that workshop each time I teach it: It remains online (and free to anyone) at http://teachdigital.pbwiki.com/podcasting.

I love Audacity because it is free, cross-platform, simple to use, exports directly to MP3, and is very powerful!

Technorati Tags: audacity, podcasting

I’ll be teaching a workshop today about classroom collaborations using videoconferencing and other technologies, from 4-7 pm US Central time. If you are interested in “Skyping in” briefly to say hello (with or without video) please leave a comment here with your Skype address, and we’ll try and give you a call!
You can use this fixed time world clock link to see what time the start of this workshop (4:15 pm US Central time) is in your time zone.

Technorati Tags: skype

Well, today was a bit scary for people living in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I live just north of Oklahoma City. A man off the street broke into a woman’s house, took her hostage, went to a bank and then Home Depot where the woman escaped by loudly yelling “Man with a gun!” He then proceeded to flee and take two new hostages in a nearby house at gunpoint. According to this article about the incident:

Police were actually able to get help from inside the home where the hostages were being held. The two hostages used text messaging to stay connected with police, letting them know what was happening inside the home. Chu [Glynda Chu, with the Edmond Police Department] says, “That was kind of a first for us to be able to use that tool of technology.”

All the Edmond schools (which my two oldest children attend) were locked down for part of the day while police used helicopters and other resources to track down and arrest the hostage taker. Pretty scary stuff.

I find it interesting and significant that a disruptive technology: instant messaging, played a constructive and possibly key role in the resolution of this crisis. If an incident like Columbine was to recur (sadly we have had several events like it, and others foiled like this one in Round Rock, Texas several weeks ago) student access to 21st century communication technologies would doubtless play an important role. Already we see tips from digital social networking sites like MySpace being used by law enforcement as well as school officials in some cases to identify threats and prevent things like violent attacks.

This reinforces a theme I’ve mentioned many times before: We need to help learners of all ages practice constructive, appropriate and safe uses of disruptive technologies like IM. Contrary to what some reactionary school leaders may believe, I don’t think instant messaging (IM) is evil. In fact quite the contrary: I think IM is an incredibly powerful and useful technology. Instead of expending large amounts of time and energy trying to block all student access to digital social networking (DSN) tools (including IM) on school networks, I think school leaders, administrators, and teachers could more effectively spend that time crafting creative ways to engage students in safe and constructive uses of DSN technologies.

That will be one theme among many of my three hour workshop today for educators in Tulsa Public Schools: Global Voices: Distance Learning Projects With Interactive Podcasting and VOIP Tools.

Tonight was a personal first: I taught a three hour workshop on podcasting to about twelve teachers in St Louis, Missouri from my house in Edmond, Oklahoma! I have taught this workshop on podcasting a fair number of times, and taught (and just “met” with others) via videoconferencing technologies a fair number of times too– but never taught this workshop at a distance. The best part was when we finished at 7 pm, I was already home!
I connected using a Polycom VSX 3000 (H.323) over the Internet at 384 kbps. The connection was excellent and didn’t have any noticeable jitter in video or audio. I don’t have my license for Polycom’s People+Content IP so I was interrupted a bit in my screensharing– but the interactive aspect of the workshop went pretty well using a Blogger blog (participants posted comments) and my workshop wiki. I was going to use the screensharing feature of Vyew, and it worked good during our pre-workshop tests, but I ended up using the People+Content demo for the screensharing I needed to do instead.

This was quite fun, and as a bonus I was able to pull my two oldest children in briefly to the workshop– Sarah talked briefly about her experiences creating her science fair enhanced podcast about hedgehogs last year when she was in kindergarten.

I’ve moved along this continuum, but I don’t see these as mutually exclusive. I currently prefer f2f, telephone and im. I’d also add blogs to this list, and also include it on my preferred list!

I agree with Jenny’s comment, these are more parallel than linear.

Aaron Schmidt posted a few interesting (but perhaps not too photogenic) photos of me in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago at the Hawaii Library Association’s conference to his Flickr site. He caught me iChatting with my family! I was actually making faces with my three year old in the following pic:

I’m not sure exactly what I was saying / communicating at this moment….

You never know when someone is going to be taking pictures and posting to Flickr!

Technorati Tags: hawaii, hla06

eSchoolNews is accepting nominations through December 1st for its 2007 Tech-Savvy Superintendent Awards. Consider nominating a deserving superintendent you know.

This was my nomination:

The leadership and vision of Jerry Vaughn continues to be pivotal as Floydada ISD has defined itself as one of the most innovative and successful small school districts in the United States. Serving a relatively high percentage of low SES students (86%), Floydada schools under the leadership of Superintendent Vaughn embarked upon a visionary journey of digitally immersed teaching and learning three years ago. After initial success of junior high school students and teachers in the state Technology Immersion Pilot (TxTIP) project involving digital curriculum and one to one learning environments for students and teachers in grades 6-8, Superintendent Vaughn provided leadership along with his board to extend the immersion project with LOCAL FUNDS (no grant dollars) to students and teachers at Floydada High School. Numerous indicators of student engagement and achievement have been up since these projects started, and much of the credit for these successes go to Superintendent Vaughn along with his motivated teaching staff. Without his vision and leadership, the students and teachers of Floydada ISD would not be where they are today: Well positioned with the tools and skills to thrive in the 21st century economy. Serving students in a relatively poor, rural school district, Floydada educators have shown that educational leadership and vision can rally community and regional support to overcome obstacles and provide exemplary learning opportunities which change lives for the better and open doors previously closed to both students and teachers.

My podcast interview with Jerry from September 2005 (“Educational Vision in Floydada ISD”) provides some additional background about Floydada and Jerry’s vision for teaching and learning there. I recently posted a rollout video to YouTube of Floydada’s initial laptop project at the JHS. This article on Apple’s education website also provides good background info.

I saw this quotation today on Mike Temple’s blog, and was reminded of the reading and thinking I’ve been doing lately related to flow and learning:

Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.- James Agee

Joe Makley shared a thoughtful comment last night to my post from December 2005 on “Educational Banner Evangelism.” Joe is questioning advocacy for constructivism and empowering teachers without accountability and at least minimum expectations based on identified standards. He wrote:

The point being, we still have standards, and they are more important than ever. It isn’t supposed to be easy for kids or us, and I don’t think technology will really play that powerful role unless we have some accountability for its use. If we just become constructivist ideologues and “guides on the side” and no one is minding the store; that isn’t going to work. It’s OK for us to tell teachers what to do now and then. And hold them accountable, and show them why and how to do it…I just get very nervous when people talk about empowering teachers, as if they’re all God’s gift to integration and they just need to be unleashed. In most cases, that’s not been my experience.

I agree that some teachers may NOT be ready and want to be “empowered” in the ways I described in this post. What I was (and am still) advocating is really a response to what I view as a very scripted, almost zero-instructional autonomy approach to instruction which has continued to gain momentum in recent years via NCLB and other efforts, including the standards movement. I acknowledge that no solution is going to meet the needs of every context– but generally I think we need MORE autonomy rather than less so that teachers and instruction itself can be truly differentiated to meet the needs of each learner. I do not want to be perceived as advocating an educational environment devoid of leadership or vision. To the contrary, our need for visionary leadership is as great as ever.

We still seem to be captives of our school-as-factory paradigms, and the fact that few people (if any) seem to have a firm grasp of how technology can be blended into face-to-face learning as well as online learning spaces poses a real challenge to us all. I do hear Joe’s point that some teachers (and even administrators) still refuse to even use email– and as a result miss important bulletins and other informational items. Late adopters / laggards when it comes to digital technology use are and will continue to be an issue with our teacher cadre… but I don’t think these people (who have a variety of reasons for not adopting technology use) should cause us all to remain focused on a standards-based, scripted curriculum in which everyone is expected to fall in line and walk lock-stepped through the instructional timeline of the year.

I continue to be captivated by what David Warlick discussed in his K-12 Online pre-conference keynote regarding “side trips” for learning. Often the “side trips” are the most engaging and worthwhile parts of the school experience for learners, and the times when learning opportunities can become most differentiated. Our present K-12 educational climate of “mandated standards for all learners” assumes that a single mold is going to work for everyone. It hasn’t, it doesn’t, and it won’t. Again this does not mean we have lower expectations for student and teacher achievement: it should in fact mean we have HIGHER expectations. I don’t think we should or must have UNIFORM expectations for everyone, however.

I also think we need to frame discussions about education and a vision for educational reform in terms of BLENDED learning. We should be wary of proposals to make all learning digital. Similarly, we should be wary of absolutist neo-luddites who categorically oppose all digitization of learning environments. Education needs to be RO (read-only) at times but also RW (read-write.) I agree we don’t need to become mindless “constructivist ideologues,” but we certainly need to become more vocal advocates for constructivism in education that we currently see in many quarters. Accountability and the standards movement have effectively crushed support for constructivist teaching and learning methods in many schools, and I think this trend is lamentable.

Is it “wrong” for a teacher to not use email? The neo-Luddite in me is about to emerge. I don’t think it’s wrong if that teacher is a good teacher. My oldest two children’s kindergarden teacher did use email, but that had really nothing to do with her status (in our minds as parents and educators ourselves) as a “master teacher.” Her use of developmental centers, the ways in which she was able to differentiate learning for the students in her care– her ability to challenge students and also have fun learning with them– all of these skills had nothing to do with technology.

So, do we need standards? We need to have curricular and learning goals and objectives. “Standards” have come to reflect the idea that EVERY student in EVERY context needs the same things. This perception on my part probably best explains my opposition to the standards and accountability movements as they have been imposed on me as a learner, parent, and teacher-leader. I am an advocate for differentiated education, authentic assessment and messy learning. I oppose scripted education which holds as its ideal vision every student sitting quietly in his/her desk, open to the same page of the textbook at the same moment in time, filling out the same worksheet that will lead to uniformly “acceptable” or even “exemplary” performance on a subsequent summative assessment measured with a bubble sheet.

I stand by my original position, but do appreciate Joe’s perspective and challenging thoughts. We need to empower teachers and administrators. If a teacher is doing a poor job, we should help him/her improve– but if they won’t change, we need to get rid of them. Yes, we need to fire them. And principals should have greater power to do just that. The problem today, of course, is that many administrators have a myopic focus on standards and student achievement as measured by summative standard tests– and in such an environment, it is likely to be precisely the out-of-the-box, creative and innovative teacher who is challenging students by teaching in differentiated ways that might be singled out by the principal as being WRONG.

The schoolhouse should not be a factory. We’ve all grown up with factory-style schools, so it is an extremely challenging task to ask each other to envision a school that follows a different model. Yet that is precisely the work to which I think we should all commit ourselves more in the months and years to come. To the extent that “standards” and “accountability” serve to primarily reinforce the vision and outcomes of a factory-style school system, I oppose them.

We need teachers who are able to engage students in educational work that matters, not just meet standards through digital worksheets that permit greater levels of technocratic efficiency. We need a school system that empowers teachers to be creative and passionate, and helps them stretch the learners in their care beyond all expectations. If the standards movement and big-stick accountability was going to “save us” in the education space, I think we’d be seeing much better results than we are currently. My perception is that much of the accountability movement as it has been promulgated most recently has everything with continuing to discredit schools and teachers so the coffers of public education dollars can be opened for private, commercial interests– instead of honestly trying to help students learn and making learning environments more effective. We do need educational deregulation– and our need for visionary leaders as well as teachers with high expectations for learners is as great as ever.

I just love articles that include phrases like, “The only limit is the teacher’s imagination!” According to last week’s eSchool News article, “Music education moves online: Web 2.0 technologies, broadband access fuel extension of music education beyond:”

Using eJamming Studio 1.5, musicians can plug their MIDI-enabled digital instruments–keyboards, guitars, bass guitars, drum kits, and wind controllers–into their computers’ USB port and connect and play with up to seven other musicians in real time…The software allows musicians to play music together in real time…Using the software, a teacher can connect with up to seven students on an eJamming “stage” using a typical DSL or cable internet connection. eJamming includes built-in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology and has a sound library containing different instrument sounds. These sounds use MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a sound-specification protocol that enables exchanges of musical information between synthesizers and computers, to ensure that if one student plays a harp sound from his or her computer, the other students on that eJamming stage will hear exactly the same sound.

In addition to eJamming, the article also mentions WorkshopLive, which also offers “keyboard, bass, or guitar lessons via a high-speed internet connection” and “In the Chair”– touted as “The web 2.0 of music.” According to a Nov 9th press release:

In the Chair is music software which allows students and aspiring musicians to practice with professional bands and orchestras. A fully immersive experience, students see and hear the musicians as they play together using their own instruments.

How amazing! These possibilities for learning and creative collaboration with web 2.0 tools are really mindblowing. Of course when it comes to education, one of the biggest fears of teachers is that they will be replaced by technology. The title of the November 9th Wired article “Web 2.0 Replaces Music Teachers” may provide more fuel for that fire, but I think the fear may be unwarranted. Teachers who fear CHANGE are in trouble, but those who embrace learning and new opportunities should be enthused with these new tools and possibilities. According to the Wired article:

In the Chair CEO David Evans observed correctly that the application turns music practice into something closer to a video game. He also announced a new web component that lets composers and teachers alter, remix or collaborate on each other’s uploaded sheet music.

This sounds like CCMixter meets Elluminate. Thanks to Julie Duffield for the original link to the eSchool News article!

It was a great learning experience as well as privilege to serve as a convener this fall for K-12 Online. In the weeks ahead I’m thinking I’ll be putting more ideas, reflections and responses about the conference down in writing and possibly in some podcasts. Here are a few thoughts I drafted tonight.

K-12 Online was a fundamentally different conference experience for presenters, participants, and conveners because the format challenged everyone to maximize the learning opportunities of blended instruction. As learners who grew up in the twentieth century, most teachers today (and everyone who participated in K-12 Online this year) are most familiar with face-to-face (synchronous) learning formats. Online, blended learning environments which involve both asynchronous and synchronous interactions between novice and expert learners can offer much richer opportunities for interaction and learning. This was the case with K-12 Online 2006.

The ways participants in K-12 Online chose to interact and respond to presentations and presenters have been wonderful. In addition to posting comments about presentations to the conference blog and posting their own blog comments about presentations, some have posted video responses to YouTube for presenters, and the presenters have replied with videos of their own! K-12 Online represents a realization of the tremendous potential offered in the online, flat world for reflection, sharing and authentic learning among educators. It is so exciting to be a teacher right now and be involved with collaborative learning events like K-12 Online, which really represent qualitatively different professional development opportunities for people around the world.

The 2006 K-12 Online conference will hopefully represent a basic shift in the way ideas and information changes hands at educational conferences. If the goal of educational conferences is to truly share ideas and make learning opportunities more accessible for learners located anywhere on the planet, I think it should follow that all the presentations at educational conferences should be made available as downloadable podcasts after each conference. In the spirit of “open content” (www.wtvi.com/teks/06_07_articles/ethic-open-digital-content.html) these materials should be offered as free downloads. When possible, presentations should be pre-recorded and made available to conference attendees in advance. When this presentation model is followed, interactive face-to-face discussions can take place at the actual conference about ideas that presenters have shared in advance via downloadable presentations. Hopefully we will see more educational conferences in the future follow these ideas which were modeled so well in K-12 Online!

Technorati Tags: k12online, k12online06