The coolest part of the conference though was seeing PJ Haarsma, author of The Softwire Series, again. He and I have presented together a few other times, and I’ve written about my work with him HERE and HERE before. This time he brought fellow author, Frank Beddor, with him to Arizona. Frank’s primary, current work is The Looking Glass Wars. He, as I’ve written here, posited the What If Alice Liddell really did come from Wonderland and was in fact the last remain heir to the Hart throne, after her wicked Aunt Red (think Queen of Hearts) had her family slaughtered. This narrative became the The Looking Glass Wars series and the Hatter M comic series.

Jim Blasingame, board president of Kids Need to Read and ASU professor, invited several people to his home the evening of conference, including yours truly. PJ and Frank are those rare breed of author who truly cares to engage children in reading and finding innovative ways to excite children about reading. Moreover, they are just nice guys.

The Kindle’s form factor is thing and larger than the iTouch, and all it does is allow you to read, download text, and and annotate. Plus it is damn expensive and for the price, foughetaboutit! Not too mention it’s easier to break because of the fragility of the factor. For me, I enjoy several different sorts of applications for my iTouch. I use educational mobile apps, games, travel apps internet utility apps, obviously my eReaders, games and some other random things.

My daughter, Claire, spending an evening out with dad at an event, playing games on my iTouch.

I’ve installed Evernote, which my friend Alan discusses at length HERE, as well as Shmoop LINK which is a mobile study guide system for history and English. Many of the games I have installed are for my daughter, but her favorite is Word Magic which allows her to learn to spell by giving her an image and a word with letters missing. She fills it in and wins virtual medals and ribbons. She can play this for hours. My travel apps were a huge deal last summer when I toured Europe, and these include Skype (which you can use easily with a miced ear piece), translators for the languages of the countries I visited, Google Maps, language dictionaries, and currency converters. Some of the coolest internet utilities I have include, obviously, Google Apps, Google Voice (before it’s ben embargoed by who knows whom), Tweetdeck, Yelp, Twitterific, Facebook, Remember the Milk, and Tumblr. My eReaders include Sony eReader Pro, which is absolute favorite because I can bookmark a page by “dog-earing” it, Stanza, which has a powerful file converter application for the computer side, and, of course, Kindle, which I actually find myself using infrequently.

I am a self-proclaimed bibliophile and was apprehensive to begin reading books electronically, but you know what? After reading a chapter, I was hooked. I could take as many books with me anywhere in the world, read in the dark (think LCD screen), and I completely forgot it wasn’t paper in front of me. No issue. I have now read about a dozen books in three months on my iTouch and haven’t look back.

Did I mention free wireless anywhere there’s a signal in the world? It’s like a mini-computer in my pocket!

After I finished talking to my colleague about that, her response was “Looks like I have a lot more research to do before settling for a Kindle.”

Getting ready for the Harold Rheingold, our morning Keynote. He’s thanking the teachers in his life, and said he is from AZ. He’s talking about his relationship with his 5th grade teacher. When he was asked to interview the principal he decided to become a writer. The year after he was sent to Art, and his mother was the teacher. This is where all of the misfits hung out. He began writing by using a typewriter, but then realized there was something called a computer. He bought his first modem in the early 1980s and it cost him $500.00! He hoped to get tons of information online, but there wasn’t much. Instead he found a community.

He realizes that the tools kids use today is far beyond where we were 25 years ago, but these are the descendants of the BBS of 1982. He’s talking about his daughter telling his wife that “Daddy’s talking to his computer again!” When his daughter got to middle school and used search engines to write papers, things clicked. His daughter and the web came of age at the same time. His slides are hilarious with links to Lycos, Alta Vista, and Infoseek. He talked to his daughter about using books to check your facts; putting terms into search engines is not guarantee that what you get back is factual. Authority use to reside in the author and publisher, but not the reader/consumer needs to ask questions about the information you find online.

A critical attitude kids today need when using the web is to always question what they find online. For example, search the name of the author of things. Teach kids critical thinking skills. Rheingold went to his daughter’s school and realized that critical thinking was a way for kids to question their teachers. School is a plot to encourage kids to question authority.

Education media literacy wise is largely happening after school now, or when “the teacher isn’t watching”. These digital natives teach each other, while schools remain a place to stick our kids when we’re at work and where society can train their citizens.

In 1995 we had this fear of internet porn show up. This moral panic over internet sexual predators could’ve led to all ISPs to censor everything down to a 12 year old. The ACLU court hearing where Rheingold testified was shot down fortunately. Kids are pretty good at spotting phonies. The predators are in the neighborhoods in real life, not necessarily online.

Today we have to harness the enthusiasm of children and teens today to develop a public voice that they care about. Media available today from camera phones, laptops, FB, Youtube is where it is today. There is an economic divide but smaller than you think. Even if they don’t have access…we need to get them using it to be successful in the 21st century.

Digital media is continuing to change, and physical public spacing is more and more closed to kids. They are moving political movements online. This is all leading to a broader participatory culture, that include RSS, social bookmarking, video sharing, mashups, etc etc etc… all have 3 common characteristics. All broadcast & receive from and to everyone, the are all social where power comes from the people and they enable faster, cheaper collective action. He said computers are mind amplifiers. Young people creative as well as consume online. They are no longer passive… they seek, adopt, appropriate and invent.

What is new is that the population of digital natives carry mobile devices, know how to use them and the internet is NOT a transformative new tech. It’s always been there like water and electricity. This all comes natural to them. Internet media is not a disengagement, and he doesn’t think they are disengaged. This is powerful tool to engage in their own voices with issues they care about. The net lets them connect to things they care about. Teachers can show them how to use these tools, contest claims, organize, etc… Media production differs from other sorts of products that have the power to persuade, power, educate, inspire movements, civilizations, etc… He’s talking about Jenkin’s new work about teaching to the 21st century. There’s a shift to how our community now works.

When his daughter came home from school, she didn’t like school because they rang bells, lined kids up in rows, etc… He has now been teaching how to been more of a community, a rhetoric of blogging. Check out http://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy.

What does civic engagement mean to us today? I think this is the largest question that he is asking of us and we’re asking of our administrators. This is the question, and people aren’t looking to this question. They aren’t thinking globally. They are thinking about standards, objectives and not leaving those kids behind. This is the wrong way to go about things.

Rheingold’s discussing http://socialmediaclassroom.com/ his website. This is a site to review, check, and engage in. When he began talking about social media, message boards and blogs flattened authority in the classroom. Create wireless creative classroom circles. There is no back row in a circle! Rheingold teach social media, so he can’t ask the students to turn off the computers…so we have to work around issues of authority in the classroom.

Don’t just keep up with the technologies. Keep up with the literacies. Beautiful. Pure beauty.

I use a free Web 2.0 app called Brightkite, which is essentially a website where you log your location. Yes, you tell the Internet where you are. Many people think this is creepy, and, yes, I have annoyed my followers when tweeting that I am here or there or home (to the point where Alan once tweeted back that he was in an airport, on the north side of the terminal, three seats from an 80yr old with blue hair… or something like that), but I like checking in. As with all good Web 2.0 apps, there’s a social side. So I checked in at bowling last week, and when using BrightKite if you and someone else check in at the same place, you can private message each other, send photos, etc… Well, a message popped up and said “Are you Devon from McClintock from like 6 years ago? It’s me XXX. I haven’t talked to you in ages!” Well, turns out a former colleague and I were in the same bowling alley and reconnected after all of this time. It’s not that I didn’t want him to find me (damn, just Google “Devon Christopher Adams” and read the pages), so it was cool to reconnect.

Then today something really made me excited. Recently I’ve been learning how cool Flickr is to search for images on ANYTHING you want! Anything. (Disclaimer: Some content is NOT PG, but you get a very large warning message first.) Donna and I have been talking about camping this weekend with Claire and Dante, the dog. I’d run Flickr image searches on several campgrounds that sound promising, and I like to use Flickr to do this because the community are people like me who take “real” photos rather than some boring picture taken by a Park Ranger who doesn’t care that I want to see shots of the fire ring, the shade trees, the ground consistency, etc… So, I’d been looking for stuff on Burnt Corral Campground along Apache Lake but nothing has ever come up, so I’ve been hesitant. Finally, today I search again. Now mind you, it’s March 18, 2009. Suddenly, in Flickr, “Burnt Corral” popped up with a note from “Hartono D” that said he and friends took their kids camping there the week or March 17, 2009. This means, they were in the VERY campsite YESTERDAY where I want to go! Claire, Donna and I immediately flipped through his photos and agreed that we are eager to give it a shot.

Without BrightKite, I wouldn’t've hooked up with Ty. Without Flickr (and all of us using it!) I may not have settled on going to this camp ground.

First workshop of the Conference for College Composition and Composition in San Francisco, CA is about applying technology applications and their use and connection within pedagogy. Reilly is introducing the workshop and operationalizing “Web 2.0″ now according to Murugesan (2007): “defies a widely agreed-upon, concise definition-perhaps because the underlying phenomenon is huge.” Web 2.0 is all about “remediation”. For example, dictionary taxonomy is now tagging, personal websites are now blogs, mp3.com is now Napster, Brittanica Online is now Wikipedia, according to the slide. I don’t necessarily agree with some of the tool comparisons here; it’s less about the NOUN of the tool. Rather, it should be about the VERB of the tool. I wonder if there’s a more recent example than O’Reilly’s from 2005 (per the citation). Now she’s talking about “mashing”, which we do. Mash-ups creates new portals/interfaces combining resources and feeds from a variety of sources. This allows the user to program the web itself. Check out Programmableweb.

Web 2.0 is a challenge, as the “privileging of non-foundational knowledge construction challenges conventional about the nature of knowledge, learning and academica’s role as the supreme arbiter of ‘truth…” (Eijman, 2008)

Go2Web20.net shows a list of various Web 2.0 tools that includes the the logo. You can click an see the tags, popularity, links (add to tags?), etc…

Another thing I thought was interesting was that this lady requires her students to write for Wikipedia. She makes them find stubs (really short wiki articles). Students begin with stubs and begin to research and synthesize the material into a neutral Wikipedia article. Students are required to cite sources or Wikipedia will delete their work. They have to use online and books. They analyze the features of Wikipedia, what makes an article “good”, they need to use the Wikipedia parenthetical citation code. They need to learn Wikipedia’s writing style.In their post, they need to justify how they wrote what they wrote and why to should not be deleted (“reverted”). There are guidelines about why they are reverted or how often they are permitted to revert an article. A month later they have to write a report on what happened to their article. Is it still there, edited, etc…? By responding to their own writing at a later date, they’re able to really see how their writing is reacted. Check out people.uncw.edu/reillyc/314.

Break out session time. I am sitting with Kate and Tony Atkins to talk about wikis. I hope to talk more about my students use of wikis. Kate’s talk about what a wiki is and how to make one in Wetpaint.com. North Carolina State University requires all students in a class to sign a FERPA consent form. NCSU takes a hardline on FERPA. Kate used her wiki as a tool towards a final project outside of the wiki.

Wikis allow for collective pedagogy, and as using group work people can still do the work wherever you want. If the student can’t make the group meeting, it’s ok; they can work on the Wiki whenever. Tony Atkins is now talking about how to use wikis for CMS.

Alisa Cooper is now talking about microblogging, but most of what she’s saying I already know. I was asked to sit in on this session to support this. One thing I got out of this was a Posterous account. Mine is now nooccar.posterous.com. Cool. I am going to keep using Posterous for CCCC.

Tony is now talking Video, and I am pretty excited because this is more of what I want to be doing. He’s talking Animoto and RockYou.com. I’ve nvever heard of RockYou, so I want to check that out soon. In these you dump your images, choose your music, and sit back! It builds a music video for you from your images and the music. The music is Creative Commons free songs on Animoto are great, and the last Animoto video I made used “Beautiful Life” which worked very well.

I was telling the group here that we use Animoto the first week of classes to take a “blink” snapshot of the students and who they are. The only real requirement was that they use at least one image of themselves. This gives us an idea of who these students are, especially since we usually will never see them face2face unless we do conferences of some sort.

He’s talking Camtasia now, which would be cool if they made it for MACs. It’s still just PC, but now he’s moved onto Whordle. In Whordle, you feed something like a blog, text, etc… and the program then calculates how often certain words are used and then creates and image of that words cluster.

Tony’s talking Video composition and discussing the differences between video editing applications in Windows and OSX. He’s talking iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Windows Movie Maker, etc… J Anthony Blair’s article is in a book on challenging visual rhetoric, and that brought up a discussion of advertising over the last 8 decades.

When using any new technology or composition type, we need to know WHY we use these tools. What are the philosophical, pedagogical, etc… underpinnings of these tools. We, as educators, need to answer that.

The future of education in technology is a virtual, non-corporeal space outside the walls of the traditional classroom. An organic, paperless global space of bits and bytes far from limited walls, limited censors, limited minds, limited cultures where the censor of knowledge doesn’t exist. Knowledge can’t be chunked into school periods from discipline to discipline. Learning has to be organic, asynchronous and synchronous simultaneously. Students should take classes based on needs and interests rather than someone dictating their learning based on what they need in order to get a piece of paper. Locale is no longer important. You could be in the same class when ANYONE demographically. ANYONE, and you would not know them physically. That doesn’t matter now. Avatars represent people however they want to be represented. Individuals CHOOSE who and what they are. They CHOOSE how they learn, what they learn. Learning now needs to be equally accessible and cross-disciplinary with the knowledge of experts who team teach what they know. Educators need to be moderators, facilitators who are flexible within their specific tool sets, and understand that we, as educators, are learners, too. We learn from our students as much as they learn from us.

Teachers are limited by (some) administrators who have been ingrained with the sorts of curriculum coming out of the late 80s, and IT departments who fear their jobs and the security of what we want them to do (Note: If you’re in IT and reading this blog, you’re obviously not that kind of IT person.) In our districts we need continuity and access. When I was in Tempe Union High School District I was given a laptop and administrator access to that computer. When I came to work I plugged it into the network and that was that. In my current district I have no legal access to mostly anything, although when I got this job we technically weren’t even allowed to use USB drives in the computers. No matter how innovative my district is, they limit us and our students. We need more access and trust. We’re not going to break anything. Teachers need symposiums on a yearly basis, where faculty can showcase their technology uses from their classes. Administrators, district and officials need to attend. Learn from Teacher 2.0 and give us flexibility and freedom to create the ideal classroom 2.0 for our 2.0 students. And what is this concept of Student 2.0 or Classroom 2.0?

Well, first of all let me be clear that we cannot have a 2.0 classroom run by 1.0 teachers. I am Teacher 2.0. If you’re here you are, too. Or at least, if you’ve read this far, you at least care enough to maybe want to be. One of the biggest concepts to review is HOW students are taught. We can no longer allow teaching in get in the way of learning. Our schools need to foster the culture that matches the tech innovations of the 21st century, and stop the teacher-centered dichotomy of the last century. School 2.0 infuses the learner-centered concept and every level, and these students are real people with minds learning and teaching teachers –not just statistics, numbers, and state funding. We need to change every thing.

Teacher 2.0 needs to move beyond Classroom 1.0, and I realize that this concept of Classroom 2.0 is relatively ambiguous (but aren’t all concepts at first?) We need MEANING in learning. If the curriculum isn’t meaningful, then forget it. We can’t teach to a set of “standards” from those who don’t know. My colleague’s on a review board of the AZ Language Arts standards, and I trust her, but she’s one person. And she’s not Teacher 2.0. Maybe don’t look for experienced teachers (those who’ve been in education for years). Pick up some people who think outside the traditional brick and mortar segmented cubicled classrooms of compartmentalized education.

Teacher 2.0 needs to rethink what it means to teach. Classroom 1.0 does not teach our students. Classroom 2.0 is learner-centered learning, and, frankly, our schools aren’t. We, Teacher 2.0, cannot adopt the awful practices of Classroom 1.0. We cannot adapt Classroom 1.0. We must begin fresh. No longer can the curriculum dictate the learning. Student 2.0 needs to negotiate their learning, while their 2.0 teacher should be facilitator. Teachers are NOT the keeper of the knowledge, and we as Teacher 2.0 need to know that learning is everywhere –not just online or offline. Everywhere. Effective learning is satisfactory and Student 2.0 is excited over the meaning of knowledge and the expertise of gaining new skill sets. Teacher 2.0 understands the concept of collaborative learning and collective intelligence instead of Classroom 1.0’s emphasis on standardized individual testing.

In Classroom 2.0 students are excited about making meaning from new learning and negotiating a community of learners. Student 2.0 learns to learn rather than being dictated that the textbook learning is holy writ. They negotiate their learning as equals with Teacher 2.0, who does not set fixed curriculum finalized by arbitrary testing. They negotiate the subjects, their education, their scholarship. Without meaning and with forced unexplaination by Teacher 1.0, Student 2.0 festers in their rowed seats.

The 21st century skills initiative calls for the preparation of Student 2.0 for the global economy. Synchronous and asynchronous relationships need to occur between the global 2.0 student whose Teacher 2.0 teaches them to navigate and evaluate the petabytes of information available to them worldwide. We need to prepare them to contribute to the global collective intelligence through an evaluation and contribution to multi-modal multi-media video, audio, textual, and image information which they then consume, rework, and regurgitate for another skill sets consumption. Student 2.0 needs to be innovative global thinkers who are provided with opportunities to tackle and challenge their world communities.

From my syntactical structure above my flip-flop of responsibility is purposeful because Classroom 2.0 is not a traditional space where we, as teachers, enter our classrooms in the summer to prepare OUR classroom. Friends, this is NOT OUR CLASSROOM. The classroom does not belong to the teacher. The classroom space belongs to all of us. You AND your students. They are Student 2.0. They NEED Classroom 2.0. Are you Teacher 1.0 or are YOU Teacher 2.0?

Some of the thoughts above were adapted, in part, from Albert Ip (2006) and Liz B. Davis (2008).