This was a letter to the editor we submitted to the News & Observer a couple weeks ago in response to an article about a parent who objected to her kid using the internet in class. The letter didn’t get picked up, but I think it’s important for staff to remember that while what we do seems obviously beneficial to us, there are still a lot of people who aren’t very keen on using the interweb in schools.

The letter:

Regarding the article, “Parents, schools at odds over Internet,” I certainly respect parents’ rights to decide what’s best for their children. However, making blanket objections to Internet use in today’s classroom is equal to objecting to textbooks.

Part of a teacher’s job is finding the best means of achieving instructional goals, whether that entails using a website or a chalk board. Teachers don’t choose online tools merely because they can, but because the information and the manner of presentation offer something uniquely valuable. Online applications such as Google Docs, NC WiseOwl, and Web-based educational resources from NASA offer levels of content, collaboration, and accessibility that simply cannot be replicated offline.

Further, the ability to use online technology is a vital skill in and of itself. Yes, you can find inappropriate material on the Web. But rather than hide the Internet from children, teachers must instruct students how to use it safely. Information literacy — the ability to find the good info and discard the bad — is a critical 21st Century skill. Shielding children may protect them in the short term, but it robs them of the ability to make intelligent informational decisions in the long run.

Melissa Thibault
Executive Director
LEARN NC

We had a productive meeting with Angela Bardeen and Chad Haefele from the UNC libraries. So many of the periodicals we would like to read are already part of the Libraries’ subscription services. Besides, with our work loads it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll keep up with reading our journals, so it seems even more foolish to subscribe to print editions.

Setting up an RSS feed from brings the most current articles to your desktop and offers an opportunity to stay current with a small investment of time and no investment of money. We spent about an hour working to get feeds in three RSS environments: Pageflakes, iGoogle and Google Reader.

Pageflakes and iGoogle provide a dashboard-type widget-intensive option that many of us find useful. If you need help with Pageflakes, Bobby and I are using that pretty extensively. Gail was working in iGoogle. Google Reader is easier to set up, I think, but requires you to actually go to another place to read your feeds… unless you cheat and use a web page widget in your Pageflakes to display your Google Reader feeds, like I do!

Bottom line, it was pretty easy to get the subscription content from some of the vendors, namely EBSCOhost, CSA, Gale and ISI, working in our various readers of choice. RSS feeds are still “experimental” in these products, so there is no guarantee that it will always work (as we experienced ourselves Tuesday morning!). Our library guides reassured us that if we persevere, we will get the feeds working just as we need them to, and if we get stuck, they are just an email or phone call away.

Contact Angela or Chad if you have any questions or need further assistance:
bardeen at email.unc.edu
chaefele at email.unc.edu
or by phone 919-962-1151

Join us to read Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol in the LEARN book club. We will order copies of the book, and invitations will be sent to those interested to the brown bag meetings on November 17, December 15 and January 12.

Email Keri by October 15 if you are interested.

Read the review from Publishers Weekly here: http://www.amazon.com/Shame-Nation-Restoration-Apartheid-Schooling/dp/1400052459/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220971936&sr=8-1

A reminder forwarded by Tim Poe of MCNC. We can look into using CCEE or since MCNC will be participating, there may be an opportunity for you to join in through their facility. Contact Tim if you are interested. tpoe@mcnc.org

The Tenth Anniversary Megaconference will be held on Nov 6, 2008, all day, everywhere.
Because this is the 10th Megaconference, some very special things will happen then that have not occurred in previous Megaconferences. The Megaconference is the largest video conference in the world, with many hundreds of participants from all over the world.
http://www.megaconference.org. Keep checking there for updates.

There is no cost, and everyone in the world with H.323 capabilities is invited to participate.

Registration closes on Oct 15, so you have only a short time to join this event.
http://digitalunion.osu.edu/megaconference/registration.html

There are many interesting presentations and events on the program, as you can see here:
http://digitalunion.osu.edu/megaconference/program.html

Door prizes (video conferencing related) will be given away by random drawing during the Roll
Call events. So far we have 44 prizes donated by 8 vendors. The Roll Calls also give everyone a chance to say hello to the world, in whatever creative way they wish. See
http://digitalunion.osu.edu/megaconference/prizes.html

A number of people who participated in the first Megaconference 10 years ago will be giving brief “Then and Now” presentations about how video conferencing has evolved and how they predict it will evolve in the future.

Special awards will be presented to those people and institutions who have participated in all 10 Megaconferences.

The event is fully interactive, and you can ask questions of the presenters, etc.

Both High Definition and Standard Definition video conferencing is available. People using HD will see SD participants in enhanced resolution, provided by a Codian MCU.

The Megaconference will appear in Second Life, on a big screen in an outdoor amphitheater, provided by the Technology Enhanced Learning and Research group at Ohio State University
(TELRPort in Second Life).

The Megaconference is available to people using the new Vidyo technology.
http://www.vidyo.com

Still under discussion are availability to people using Elluminate, and a guest appearance by the President of Ohio State University.

The Internet2 Commons, OARnet, Ohio State University and many other organizations throughout the world provide support to make this event possible.

I am, as usual, beating myself up about a failure to do something perfectly. (”Must get A. OK, A+ works, too.”) I have been warned by friends and colleagues, coached by professionals, and reassured by family members that it is OK to NOT to do everything to the nth degree, OK not to be perfect. Rumor has it that there is a RANGE of acceptable performance on various endeavors. Who knew? Apparently that range is NOT, as I have always maintained, A to A+, but rather there are other options, including B and C!

So what am I stewing about now? Getting Things Done. I read it (OK, well almost all of it) and I worked to put it in place and yet I have not systematized this, I am still struggling. What should I do? Renew my commitment to this program? Quit?

[This is how it is for perfectionists, BTW, you either do it perfect or you quit ’cause you are not doing it perfect.]

Turns out lots of people struggle to GTD and that it is OK to do something different. According to the author, David Allen, I need some version of “collect” so I can externalize all the stuff spinning in my head and I can get the bandwidth to be productive. In an interview about his new book, he says “It takes a couple of years for most people to really, really, really begin to integrate that so that that builds the consequential and sort of cruise control kinds of behaviors.” Years. I don’t have to quit, I just need to make it OK to not get an A+, OK to not know how to do it in the first month, OK take the time it takes to systematize. I can do that, right?

As is evident to anyone reading, I have struggled with blogging. My “fits and starts” are a result of my uncertainty of purpose and lack of time to allocate to this process. Who am I writing for? What is important enough to require my chiming in to the discussions in the blogosphere? How can I find the time to actually process issues of import? For me, Blogging has been more of a thing to be observed than a thing that comes naturally.

For others, however, it is a very different story. I have enjoyed the work of avid bloggers who write to think, and the product of their effort really contributes to the conversations about teaching and learning. This inspires me to keep at it, and brings up another important point — just because I am not driven to blog doesn’t mean blogs are useful as tools for learning. (Hear Homer Simpson here… “D’oh!”)

Two interesting ideas that seem right on to me. The first, Blogging the Research Process. In a September 2007 blog entry, Joyce Valenza recommends this practice as a way to facilitate transparency and constructivism, noting that through blogging, students can reflect on the process, get organized, and involve others in the process, ultimately contributing to the larger body of knowledge. The second, also from School Library Journal, is another simple yet powerful way to use blogging tools to enhance learning… a Book Blog. Like a book club, the Guerrilla Season Book Blog provides a place for students to engage their classmates and the rest of the world a project in which the “… diverse group exchanged thoughtful impressions about the book and pondered some provocative questions, adding a whole new dimension to the reading experience.” (Langhorst, 2006)

Simple, logical, powerful tools for learning. I get it. You can too! Pick up The Guerrilla Season and join Eric Langhorst’s book blog project between MARCH 3 and APRIL 4, 2008. See you there!

As an economics major, I know widgets. I have considered the elasticity of demand for widgets, the consumer surplus when widgets are priced competitively, and the change in price when the component materials for making widgets are suddenly more scarce. Always, my professors discussed economic concepts in terms of widgets.

Now, today, I am actually using widgets! Thanks to Widgetbox, I can easily create a way to keep up with ever-changing content like the LEARN NC features and the latest Instructify articles. I’ve even created one for this blog.

Just this morning, Bobby and I were discussing how we really need something to pull together the fiftyleven things we need to update, read, check, and generally pay attention to. How can we keep up with it all?

Pageflakes might just help me, as they promise in their byline, Get it Together. Using this tool, I can pull together the news, online tools, blogs and more that I am trying to keep up with. I can even create widgets and with one click, put them on my Pageflakes page. Pretty cool, eh?

Some of you have been with me when I mentioned to teachers the availability of PBS videos on NC LIVE. I believed that as NC citizens and taxpayers, anyone who was authorized as a library user could access these and, since it would be fair use to show them in a F2F classroom, teachers could include these in their teaching. I was wrong.

Apparently there is a willingness to pay in the school audience. If you are familiar with the 4 factors you must consider to determine if something is covered by fair use, you will see right away that if PBS considers the schools another potential paying customer, then we are violating fair use by showing these videos without paying for them. If you are unfamiliar with fair use, see David’s entry in the LEARN NC education reference area, http://www.learnnc.org/glossary/fair+use

Long term, the implications of segmenting the audience and charging schools as a separate customer is disturbing. We are essentially being charged twice if both NC LIVE and NC Wiseowl subscribe to the same content. Twice the tax money to the vendor for the same content. How can that be OK? Maybe if/when NC Wiseowl seeks to add the same content, PBS will give us a price break since all of the public library, community college library and university library users already are authorized as NC LIVE users. I certainly hope so.

It is all based on willingness to pay, which brings me to the most important issue… we must use our fair use exemptions or we will lose them. The more we hesitate and contact vendors to purchase an article here or there, the more we are signaling that there is another market for selling the content. It will be scary indeed when all the content and information is only available for fee.

Sorry for the rant, but you can see I feel strongly about this, and if you are still reading, thanks for listening.

The video and its impact have been noted for years on the internet, and chances are you have already seen this (or a version of this) but just in case…

Carl Fisch’s blog post and presentation entitled Did_You_Know? has been attracting the attention of political and education leaders, teachers, parents and other citizens for some time. What better way to get a discussion started about the importance of global education and 21st Century Skills than to play this video as people enter the room? That’s what Bobby Hobgood did at his session at the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina conference and I have been meaning to read and write more about it. Check it out, what do you think?

I was writing to my father at the sideline of the soccer field Saturday and the dad sitting next to me commented. “I can’t remember the last time I received a letter.” he said, “seems to be a dying practice.” Indeed. The reason my father and I use snail-mail to converse is because we followed the trends in communication from letters mailed to letters faxed, to email and then, finally, IM. The quality of the communication was disappointing to both of us, so we’re back to writing… trading the timeliness of electronic communication for the depth of a written letter.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) just posted a thoughtful paper on just this subject. Social Networking, the “Third Place,” and the Evolution of Communication starts with a non-judgmental assessment of the changes to acceptable communication that mirrors the experience I have had with my father. There is a reduced “cost” in time, effort and attention in technology-mediated conversations. “With instant messaging, we understand that the other party’s attention may wander between messages in some cases and remain focused on us, as with a phone call, in others.” The article goes on to note that the context of a conversation, including the type of technology being used, impacts the “environmental context” of the conversation. An IM conversation will be different in tone from a phone conversation… just the difference in the expectations for attention to the other person can impact context.

This paper goes on to present the Internet as the “Third Place” (after home and work) where people can meet and connect. Beyond tracking the evolution of conversation (old-school) this part of the article claims new means of communication, new places to communicate, and new avenues of interaction afford us new ways of connecting that transcend the possibilities of traditional conversation. Skype, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, LinkedIn… possibilities for social and professional access are greater and the likelihood that you may create and maintain connections, share experiences, and perhaps, through the variety of media and length of interaction, create an even more significant connection that is possible with the written word alone.

As I read the questions for consideration I recall how I have bemoaned the potential loss of traditional modes of contact. Am I missing out on a potentially richer, sustained opportunity for interaction by shunning electronic modes of communication? NMC also raises questions about the nature of interpersonal interactions as well as the attractions and pitfalls of online communication. Take a look. What do you think?