Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Thinking big as the world grows smaller by Hall Davidson

Thinking big as the world grows smaller by Hall Davidson

Published by Wesley Fryer in blogs, creativity, disruptive-technology, socialnetworking, web 2.0 on February 28th, 2007

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These are my notes from Hall Davidson’s keynote at METC today. (My own commments and reflections are included in ALL CAPS.) I’m recording this to post as a podcast later, and Hall is wearing my iRiver! So unlike MacWorld where he moved around from the podium and I didn’t get a good recording, the recording today should be great!

Things are really getting smaller
Shrinking between:
- geographic places
- people
- parents and schools
- students and students

We hope the distance between STUDENTS and TEACHERS is not shrinking

[MY THOUGHT: THE DISTANCE BETWEEN STUDENTS AND TEACHERS IS SHRINKING OUTSIDE THE BOUNDS OF THE TRADITIONAL SCHOOL DAY, AS BLENDED LEARNING OPTIONS ARE USED WHICH INCREASE ACCESS VIA ONLINE TOOLS]

Temporal shrinking in time?
- started teaching in 1971 in Middle School, there was 1 phone for all the teachers in the lounge
- adoption time seems to be about 3 years between the business world and education world

We are in a world when you can think of a world and in 5 years it is worth several billion dollars (YouTube)

website: Airtradoctions “there’s something in the air”
- this was my idea, but I’m not getting any credit!

Remember the days when you were searching google for data?
- is podcasting a worldwide phenomenon or just in the United States?
- do search for “student podcasts” with Google language tools in English, then in Spanish, then in Chinese
- then check hits
- plotting the data: Chinese, French, Spanish and English: lots of data for English speakers
- Spanish is dominant if you graph without English
- so look at data just from the Google hits

Remember Katie Couric?
- when she went to nightly news
- compare discussion on Technorati about Katie Couric against people like Kathy Lee Gifford, Paris Hilton, Quasimoto…

Google Trends
- search for trends

Demo of Google language tools
- translate webpages into other languages on the fly, links are also translated!
- translating phrases as well

[IF TEACHERS ARE GOING TO USE THIS FOR NOTES HOME, I'D RECOMMEND THEY RUN THE NOTE BY A NATIVE SPEAKER FIRST!

Other Google tools: Google Mobile

Hall wants to invite Google Gaggle to meet people in close proximity to use

[MY THOUGHT: A SERVICE LIKE THIS ALREADY EXISTS! MEETRO: THE SOCIAL MESSENGER. THIS MAY BE OK FOR ADULTS BUT CAN RAISE REAL PROBLEMS FOR KIDS.]

We now have the kind of world where when you think of something, it can happen
- you can envision something, it can become a reality
- imagination is so close to reality
- where to you start to teach kids with it?

Start with the things in their pockets
- picture of Google in braille
- kids expect things now to come with pictures, sound, multimedia

Cell phone pictures of the London bombings
- inspired werenotafraid.com

Example: take a cell phone image
- first choice is to SEND it somewhere
- Hall is sending it to his own email address
- image going through invisible rays in the air to a cell tower, the Internet, and to my email account

[HALL COULD ALSO HAVE POSTED THIS DIRECTLY TO THE WEB VIA FLICKER MAIL!]

So the teacher can actually give kids an assignment to use their cell phone and take pictures
- we can build a website with these things
- interviews, pictures

Example of cell phone shot video from Student from Ithaca, NY
- from student media festival in CA
- new category: video shot with cell phones

[CELL FLIX CONTEST FROM ITHACA, NY]

[AND YOU CAN EDIT IT ON THE WEB WITH VIDDLER, JUMPCUT, OR EYESPOT]

Pennsylvania teacher David’s video
- who do you send it to? The parent

Can use cell phones to teach poetry
- ancient Japanese poetry forms fits into cell phone text messaging box
- Tanka: 31 syllables in 5 lines, Japanese NPR “Saturday is Cellphone Tanka Night” and they get 3000 emails from cell phones

So we could teach Limericks
- example of epitaph from student in Louisiana

Kids can and will want to remix something like a challenge for creative Limericks

Why are community spaces online so important?
- the people

traffic x 2.5 than Google?
- MySpace
- so why is that? it is the nature of who we are, we want to be social

We have homosapiens in our classrooms all the time, and we have to find ways to tap into this

Us versus them
- the people on TV and in magazine aisle are NOT the most important ones in the world
- myspace demonstrates this

Example of DENblog
- examples of St Louis blogs

More videos are shared via MySpace than YouTube by a factor of about 5

How many people have been sent a video?

Why not create a community space to share things for school?
- share information, project based learning
- we can set those spaces up for free

Google for Educators

I work with the American College of Cardiology
- they used to charge for the information, no one came
- made it free, no one came
- made it a community of sharing information that users cared about, now people come

Story of Centrual Bucks School District
- principal did a search in Xanga for the name of the school and “bomb”
- the kid had posted a picture of his explosives at his home
- that kid was identified because a kid was

Steve Dembo does an entire session on this, being careful about what you put on your “permanent record”
- many of these kids posting stuff to the web are going to interview for teaching jobs sometime!

Fullerton School District
- did a google notifier for their school address, learned all these ways parents were circumventing the rules to get their kids in the school

Kids can use moodle, create blog sites

Where is a good place to learn about that? Here! Today!

DEN story of Keynote Coffeehouse, Feb 19, 2007
- Hall went to Coffeehouse (Panera) and did the keynote with 2 laptops
- 1 did webinar on a PC and used iSight on a Mac

How many kids have mp3 players
- talked to a kindergarten teacher, all her kids have iPods
- what can you put into an iPod? Self study, powerpoints

Copyright video of Hall
- Copyright and Fair Use: A Guide for Administrators
- renamed it “Hillary Duff” for his daughter’s iPod!

Doctor at Temple in the Medical school, recorded
- Dr. Michael Barrett
- turned out after 3 hours of listening on an iPod, ability to diagnose rose from 39% to 89%

Can do phonics, multiplication tables, lots of things with an iPod that we are not doing
- it is a reason to get an iPod, it is a reason to write off an iPod

www.audiosteps.com
www.podguides.net

Can make these adventures using those devices that students have in their hands

People podcasting in college
- students can stop coming to class (only 10%)

Choices: stop podcasting or energizing the lecture
- many times in college, there is NOT an advantage to coming to the lecture
- study of freshmen LA TIMES 1/26/2006 found 58% of 142 freshmen fell asleep in class

K-12 Schools
- grandparents can hear what the kids are doing
- picture of grandma holding a pie and wearing an iPod

We can become more interesting using media

President Bush’s State of the Union address on iTunes, and the other state of the union addresses
- and the responses
- if you do, use Google Language tools and translate “Politician to English”

Want to see how a cell phone can go immediately on the web

Dial 888-654-2278 (original 301-785-0719) and enter 8534
- then you can comment directly onto this keynote presentation
- can leave an audio comment
- using gcast.com

Kids are getting smarter, IQs are going up
- our kids made my globe spin the right direction by reversing the image!

Technorati Tags: metc, metc07