Making Meaningful Connections

NEIT2009 Days 2 and 3
At the closing keynote, Michael Wesch (@mwesch) posed this essential question: "How can we create students who can create meaningful connections?" At this conference I made dozens of meaningful connections. I learned about school to school collaborations, tried to figure out Google Wave (still don't get it), introduced more folks to Twitter and had a great discussion about effective professional development.

I talked and danced with many new faces including more people I had only known previously online. These included Bill Campbell (@BillCamp), Karen Blumberg (@specialkrb), Michelle Koetke, Matthew Lipstein (@matthewlipstein), Don Buckley, Aaron Grill (@agrill), Andrew Katz, Denise Daley, Kerri Richardson-Redding (@nandikerri), Lan Heng (@lheng ), Colin Samuel (@colincsh), Barbara Swanson (@barbaraswanson), Lisa Pedicini (@Pedicini ), Anne Marie Rowley (@amrowley), Julien Laveyssieres (@jlaveyssieres), and of course Arvind Grover (@arvind) and Alex Ragone (@alexragone). (I'm sorry if I've forgotten some people.)

I even got shake hands and get my picture taken (along with Kerri Richardson-Redding) with Michael Wesch himself. When I introduced myself to Michael he said he knew me from Twitter. OMG! You can imagine the look on my face when he said that. Talk about making a meaningful connection. That man is one of my rockstars! Here are some of my revelations from his talk. You can watch the entire keynote here including the etherpad collaborative notes. I reccommend that you do. Both parts were amazing.

Five Things I'm thinking about after listening to Michael Wesch:

1. We need to go from creating knowledgeable students to creating knowledge-able students who can think and discover for themselves.
   
   
2. Media are not just tools - media mediates relationships. Technologies shape who can say what, who can hear it and what can be said. When media changes, relationships change. When you introduce media into a culture you have cultural shift.
   
   
3. There are no natives here - these technologies are only 5 years old and in 5 years there will be new technologies that are only 5 years old. We are all in the same boat. We can't give ourselves an out by suggesting that we don't have to teach students and ourselves how to best use these tools.
   
   
4. All real learning hurts because it changes us in some way. If it's easy then we aren't doing it right. We need to be willing to take more risks and fail and get back up again. If we aren't failing then we aren't really learning.
   
   
5. The ultimate question is how can we create students who can create meaningful connections? Maybe the first step is learning ourselves how to create meaningful connections. There is also a question of what makes a connection meaningful.

Wrapping Up:
We ended the conference with a World Cafe style discussion. I chose to sit at a table where we discussed creativity and innovation. What struck me at the end of our talk was the number of dichotomies that I am constantly balancing. The tension between tradition and innovation, between risk and reward, between product and process, between, my educational philosophy and the philosophy/culture of the school. The trick is to find a way to be comfortable with the discomfort. Good luck with that ;-)

Image Sources:
2009-11-13-NEIT2009 046 from alex.ragone's photostream on Flickr
Liz, Kerri and Michael from alex.ragone's photostream on Flickr
2009-11-13-NEIT2009-WorldCafe 040 from alex.ragone's photostream on Flickr

Reflections on NEIT2009 - Day One

I could hear my heart beating in my chest as I drove up to the Mohonk Mountain House, the site of the NEIT (New York State Association of Independent Schools (N) Education (E) Information (I) Technology (T) conference. I was excited, but also nervous at the end of my 3.5 hour drive. I learned about this conference from the tweets of two independent school educators, Alex Ragone and Arvind Grover, whom I greatly respect, but had never met.

It has been a while since I have attended a conference without knowing lots of people. I remember back to my first Educon 2.0 when my Twitter network first came alive. Since then, most conferences I attend are filled with real life versions of my virtual learning network. At NEIT2009 however, there was only one person at the conference that I had met face to face before, Kerri Richardson. Fortunately, her smiling face was there to meet me at the registration desk when I arrived. And what followed was everything I had hoped for and more.

I have never attended a truly open space conference. Edubloggercon is sort of open space, but many of the sessions are posted on the wiki before the conference. Not so at NEIT where the conference built itself as it went. But first, Siva Vaidhyanathan kicked the conference off with his Keynote, The Googlization of Everything.

The message I took away from Siva’s talk is that we can’t stop questioning the corporations that surround us. As Siva put it, “Google has been around for less time than Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were married. Why should we trust them?” We might love Google and what it does for us, but we have to remember that we are not actually Google’s customers, we don’t pay Google anything, we are Google's products. We provide the data that feeds their advertisers. This doesn’t mean that Google is bad, but just that we have to be careful not to get drink the Google Koolaid without also checking to see if it has been spiked.

Next we started the open space portion of the conference. Here people were given blank pieces of paper and markers. People interested in presenting sessions wrote down the name of their session on the paper, announced it to the group and then posted it on the session board. When we began the board had 70 of blank spots. By the end of the conference all but 7 were filled.

After a lovely tea and cookies break, we had our first session. I attended one on problem based learning. Michelle Koetke facilitated this session. She shared a project that she had done with her students on the Images of Girls Online. I learned from this session that an excellent project is driven by an authentic real question. If the question is real enough, the students will drive the project themselves. I think the hardest part is figuring out the best question. That is what I still struggle with. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to come up with good questions?

More on day 2 of the conference in my next post...

Image Sources:
DSCF7594 from musicanys' photostream on Flickr
"How to Rawk NEIT2009" with Alex and Arvind from SpecialKRB's photostream on Flickr
IMG_8314 from arvindgrover's photostream on Flickr
IMG_7909 from arvindgrover's photostream on Flickr
IMG_8372 from arvindgrover's photostream on Flickr
2009-11-11-Mohonk 091 from alex.ragone's photostream on Flickr
DSCF7697 from musicanys' photostream on Flickr

Twitter List Screencast

Recently Twitter introduced the ability to create and subscribe to lists. I've been playing around with this new feature and I think it has a lot of potential. I created this screencast to show a few of the things I've learned.

In addition to my screencast, @_stevewoods wrote a great post describing Twitter lists. And, here is the direct link to the Twitter Gadget for embedding your list on a website.

Please share your tips. What have you learned about lists? Do you like them? I'm still trying to figure out how to subscribe to a list in a reader. Does anyone know how to do that?

P.S. This is the first time I have included my own image as part of the screencast. I'm not sure if I like it, or if it is helpful. Let me know what you think.