Roads of Learning in the 21st Century (v 1.0)

Last night I finished editing a fifteen minute video I’ve been planning for several weeks. It is titled “Roads of Learning in the 21st Century,” and extends the metaphor of “learning on the rails” and “taking sidetrips for learning” shared by David Warlick in his preconference keynote address (in video form) for the 2006 K-12 Online conference. I use the metaphor of the railroad to talk about schools and learning in the 21st century, including the issue of school reform. This video requires free QuickTime player software – right click or control click and choose SAVE TARGET AS or SAVE LINK AS to save the video to your hard drive:

Roads of Learning in the 21st Century video (32.9 MB, 14.53 min)

I’ll be using this video in a keynote address I’m sharing tomorrow from South Padre Island via videoconference, to teachers in Richardson, Texas attending the Technology H.O.T.S. – (Higher Order Thinking Skills) conference at ESC Region 10. At the start of my keynote conversation, I’m going to invite the teachers in Richardson to view and then discuss this video. I’m going to use it to set the stage for my keynote theme, “Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create, and Assess.” I’ll use and update my wiki curriculum on this topic to explore this theme, and hopefully both generate greater awareness about how these tools are and can be used for learning as well as inspire some teachers to “leave the rails” of traditional learning with their students! I had previously considered pre-recording myself speaking on these topics as a “talking head” using videoconference equipment and H.323 recording equipment, but as I thought more about the potential impact and value of that video compared with one I could record “on location” in a related context to my message (actually by a railroad track and railroad cars) — the latter choice seemed like it could definitely be more effective and powerful!

There are several minor technical problems with this video I’d like to fix at some point, but for now given my time constraints (and the rendering speed of my current laptop) I’ll have to go with what I have. The fixes I want to do at some point to this video include:

1. Deleting the part of the second scene where I incorrectly refer to railroad spikes as “ties.”
2. Removing a short audio glitch at the start of the SL section in the transition.
3. Boosting the audio level for my voice in the section on Second Life.
4. Shortening the end of the SL section.

This was my first effort using my iRiver T10 to separately record audio for a video, and later synchronizing those audio clips with video. I am pleased with the results. The wind noise captured with the actual camcorder microphone was VERY loud and distracting, so without the iRiver the overall quality and effect of this video would be MUCH worse.

Feel free to share and use this video for your own educational purposes. (Like my safe blogging video from January, it’s shared under a Creative Commons license.) I’d welcome any feedback or comments on this video, both from content and technical standpoints.

Technorati Tags: education, educationreform, school2.0, schoolreform, secondlife

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