Is this your future classroom? Does this represent your future vision of Education?

This is a student film festival award winner.  It shows some great special effects and portrays some cool technological possibilities, but is this how you envision the classroom of the future?  The teacher is still at the front and the students are following his/her lead.   Is that what we want?

What are your thoughts?

Who is the MySpace Generation? Why Do We Care?

Who is the MySpace Generation? What is different about them? Why should we care?

ISTE will be holding a Webinar on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2008 at 3:00 CST entitled Learner 2.0: The MySpace Generation by Chris O'Neal. These are some resources that might be useful for you to review before (or after) webinar.

BusinessWeek headed an issue with their article by Jessie Hempel entitled The MySpace Generation: How Companies are Reaching Them. This article investigates the Social Networking phenomenon. It talks about how youth are using MySpace, Facebook, and a variety of social networking systems to make contact with others. Their group is not geographically limited. It is primarily defined by like interests. BusinessWeek provides a podcast about its cover stories (CoverCast). This is an interview with the author about the content included in the cover story. Jessie Hempel provides an insightful perspective on this topic in the podcast. This podcast does an effective job of describing what is happening and how it displays youth's priorities.

Dinah Boyd has spent a great deal of time investigating the social networking world and I found an informative 71 minute lecture by her on YouTube Dinah Boyd: A Discussion with Danah Boyd.(2005) She is talking with a group of university students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Boy does she know what she is talking about. She cuts through the baloney and "tells it like it is."

A more recent lecture by Dinah Boyd (2007) is her presentation at the Australian Library and Information Association - Generation MySpace - Social networking and Its Impact on Students and Education.

PODCAST: A Discussion of the Issues Surrounding Social Networking Between Faculty and Students This is an interesting 25-minute discussion between a couple of K-12 teachers. They discuss how Facebook fits into their interactions with students and what new challenges it provides. Quite informative.

2020 Vision

2020 Vision is a 15-minute video developed by Karl Fisch as a staff development video to motivate Arapahoe high school teachers to engage in future visioning. It is set as that graduate speech at a high school graduation for students in 2020. He selected this year because these graduates would have begun kindergarten in 2007.

This video is a story of Google taking over the world. Even has them going into solar cells and developing electric G-Cars. The most important part is his envisioning that Google provides a 9th grade through Masters educational system. If the present schools aren't going to use the educational potential of technology, Google will. He even said that all of these schools are provided free because Google will make enough money on the Google Ads running on their school portals that it covers the cost.

I am not saying that everything that Karl Fisch says is true, but it is interesting. It does provide a reasonable view of what the next 13 years might involve (I especially liked how he referred to actions that President Obama will take =-). It can work as the springboard for discussion which is exactly why he developed it.

Watch it and think . . . and talk . . . and think . . . and do.

Distance Education through Second Life

As I contemplate the opportunities provided by Second Life, I see a number of potential pathways.

Consider SL as an opportunity to provide another dimension to distance education. It can provide another dimension that will enrich the learning experience. Last night I taught one of my distance education courses at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). It is a face-to-face video course over the Iowa Communications Network (ICN). The ICN is an Iowan resource composed of a state-owned fiberoptic network that connects over 800 broadcast sites throughout the state. These broadcast/reception sites vary in sophistication, but all of them include monitors for reception and cameras for broadcasting. Most of them include teacher computers along with DVD players, VHS players and overhead cameras. It is said that no one in Iowa lives more than 20 from an ICN classroom.

My class last night involved me sitting alone in an ICN classroom at UNI and talking with students at 7 sites across the state. Most of my classes include students in the UNI classroom as well as the satellite classrooms but not this time. I control who and what is seen from my control tower. Some sites have multiple students while other students sit alone in their classrooms. The interaction between the students and between the students and me is somewhat limited. I don't see students communicating much between themselves outside of the classroom unless they are involved in completing a classroom assignment.

Imagine if this course was taught in SL. At it's basic level, it would be a chat room with avatars. Interaction would depend upon students' typing skills as well as their interest in the topic. One of the problems with using a written interface is the extended lag time between questions and answers. This gives us a chance to consider our ideas before we share them but it can also cause frustration. SL will ultimately provide an audio interface (it is in beta format now) which will bring a more satisfying interaction between participants. I have used Skype to interact with others while in SL and it worked well. Unfortunately, there is a limit of 4 participants (I think) in a Skype conference call so it would require limiting the class size.

SL can play audio and video broadcasts that are streaming through the Internet. This means that I could share videos from Edutopia by the George Lucas Education Foundation. I could just post them one of the videos screens in SL in my "classroom" whatever that may look like.

Playing streaming audio feeds also means that we could use the Webcasting technology that the EdTechTalk podcast guys have developed. This means that multiple folks could connect with me through Skype and then broadcast this through the web which could then feed through SL. The best part is that we would see the avatars standing/sitting together. I have found this geographical proximity to be an interesting phenomena which I will discuss in another posting but I think that it improves the interaction experience.

Musical concerts are happening in SL every week so the process of mass communication is already a reality. This interaction is something that will provide great opportunities.

What about panel discussions or group interaction or ??? These are the topics for another post.