nordengren's blog

This is regional conference number 2 for me, and my third Educause event in as many months.  I January, it was my good fortune to meet many of you during the ELI annual conference in San Antonio.

In February, I attended the Southwest Regional Educause conference in Houston, and today, we're wrapping up the Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago.

What I observe is the conference titles did much to set up the differences in the attendees and the conference experience -- and gloabaly, these differences really define where we are with education technology today. To attend all three gives the broader and more strategic view of our work together.

The conference titles were:

It's my pleasure to be in Chicago tihs week for the Midwest Regional 2008 and I have the opportunity to reprise my presentation from the Southwest Regional last month.

The challenge today is I'm part of a lightning round of other great presenters, we each have 5 minutes.  It looks to be another reat day at the conference and I hope to catch up with you today and tomorrow morning!

Thanks to those of you who attended my presentation today.  I invite you to keep in touch and share ideas.

Here is the link to my personal blog:  http://www.digitalstoryteller.com

The 12/10 posts are here:  http://www.digitalstoryteller.com/topic/1210-conspiracy/

The original 12/10 list is here:  http://www.digitalstoryteller.com/2007/09/25/1210-the-list/

If you missed my presentation, there are summaries:  one from from Twitter, courtesy of Chris Duke:

http://cmduke.googlepages.com/web20faculty.html

and one  from an Educause Blog by Harriet Watkins

http://connect.educause.edu/blog/happyharriet/the1210conspiracyguidingf/46247

I'll be at the Southwest Regional Conference beginning tomorrow.

I'm presenting our work here at Des Moines University in faculty use of Web 2.0 tools on Thursday.  I hope you can join the conversation....and learn about the 12:10 Conspiracy.  I look forward to meeting you.

If you are an educator in the classroom, you've observed and probably participated in or overheard conversations between other educators about what students are doing with their computers during lectures and class time.

Is it a good thing?  is it a bad thing?  Does it matter?

From the back of the room, at this year's ELI Conference in San Antonio, the participants had their laptops open during many of the sessions.  And more often than not, the page open was a WordPress blog entry page or the Educause Blog Entry interface.  Real time note taking, blog cast to other participants and the world.

This conference, I opted for pen and Moleskine note taking, although I saw more than the average number of Moleskines as well.

And while many of the real time blogs and the contributions of the twitter-ati are already old news, here is a sampling of observations and quips I picked up from the 3 day event.

In my last learning partner update, I shared the NMC and Educause Horizon Report from 2007. My post was a retrospective look at their findings nearly a year ago.

The report included key trends, critical challenges and technologies to watch, and I highlighted one of the urgent things to notice was a lack of information literacy. Combined with that is an opportunity to look at the skills gap identified in the Horizon report:

There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content. Although the new tools make it increasingly easy to produce multimedia works, students lack essential skills in composition, storytelling and design.

Educause and the New Media Consortium released The Horizon Report 2007 Edition back in Spring. The 2007 report included six “key trends”, seven “critical challenges” and six “technologies to watch” and their projected adoption periods.

As I looked back through this report what jumps at me are these items and how they potentially impact us at Des Moines University.

Two of the reports “Key Trends” include:

Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college.

Okay, here it is: A record company executive, an educator, and a cell phone executive all go to a meeting in at the Venetian in Macau….

Clearly by now, you've figured out the joke: educators don't have a travel budgets that let them go to Macau. So the educator wasn't there! So instead, we rely on media and blog reports of the event.

George Siemens mentions the idea of teacher as curator in todays blog at elearnspace. He cites his own more detailed description of a curatorial teacher:

A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected. While curators understand their field very well, they don’t adhere to traditional in-class teacher-centric power structures. A curator balances the freedom of individual learners with the thoughtful interpretation of the subject being explored.

I think there is genius in his phrase “expert learner”. What he describes, to me is very much the role of a producer in a video or recording project. Think of George Martin for the Beatles, Quincy Jones for artists from Sarah Vaughn to Michael Jackson, or Mutt Lange for Shania.