Tag: Information landscape

Posted on

Use Wiffiti to Engage Your Audience – Big Screen Live Presentation of Feeds from Twitter, Flickr and Text Messages

I’m always looking for ways to make my presentations more engaging and interactive. (A must if you’re advocating more student-centered instruction.) I’ve been using a TurningPoint ARS for years with great results and have tried live blogs at my larger workshops. As a convert to Twitter, I thought it was the logical next step. 

I’ve experimented with Twitter visualizers on my blog- StreamGraph,  TwitterCloudExplorer, and most recently, Wiffiti. When I saw how good Wiffiti looked on my blog, and I realized it would be a great way to capture the backchannel at workshops. Users can interact with Wiffiti from their mobile phones or the web. It looks great on the big screen – plus it can feed from Twitter, Flickr and text messages.  

I opened a free account and gave it a trial run at my recent workshop in Moriarty-Edgewood SD, New Mexico. It was easy to create a new Wiffiti screen with custom background. (I selected a local landmark neon sign from old Rt 66 in Moriarty.)  I set up the Wiffiti screen to capture Tweets tagged with my Twitter user name @edteck.

The evening before the presentation, I posted a Tweet asking for greetings – “Say good morning to my teachers’ workshop on old Rt 66 in NM. Where are you from? Why do you Twitter?”  As participants arrived in the workshop,  they were greeted on the big screen with encouraging words from all over the world. Pretty impressive when you’re talking about the impact of technology on teaching and learning!  Special thanks to all that sent greetings – it was an powerful demonstration of the new landscape of information and a display of the power of Twitter / social media!

I shot a bit of video to give you and idea what it looked like.  
 (Remember, the live version of this screen no longer has Tweets relevant to the workshop.)

New Wiffiti messages are instantly displayed center screen and are easily viewable from a distance. Older messages then fade back and move as an animated cloud. Updates from both mobile and web are displayed synchronously across all screens subscribing to the same tags, encouraging the creation of a wide, cross-channel audience.

 Using Wiffiti in Breakout Sessions

I also created a second Wiffiti screen to use during break outs. This one was designed to capture text messages from participants. For those that did not have cells, we set up computer stations where they could make comments directly from the Wiffiti website.

Here’s some sample comments – a nice mix of thoughtful observations, fun comments and a few critiques. (Note: I kept it real and I ran my system unmoderated, but it is possible to have someone monitor comments.) 

“School is where kids go to watch old people work really hard”

“My Brain Hurts!”

“Let’s get going!”

“disequilibrium, change, and freedom”

“same old stuff, different day!”

“the table in the back rocks!!”

“English teachers and librarians rule -all others drool!”

“having a blast!”

“science is over here.”

“This is a great workshop!”

“Enjoying the presentation Peter. Especially the film clips!”

“Rigor and Relevance for the English Department: Rigor: Apply knowledge and skills in complex ways to analyze and solve real problems…”

My bottom line? Wiffiti is a great way to harness back channel workshop comments. The free version works well and paid versions offer more opportunities to customize and monitor comments. 

Posted on

School Board Leaders Reflect on Essential Questions and 21st Century Learning

new mexico
new mexico

Last week, I did a 90 minute keynote at the New Mexico School Board Association’s Leader’s Retreat. I used a “Socratic approach” and framed my talk around a series of themes and sample questions in a talk called “What Questions Should School Boards Be Asking about 21st Century Learning?” For details on my keynote theme, essential questions and blog reader comments click here.

The school board leaders had some interesting responses to my evaluation that inspired me with their willingness to rethink the landscape of teaching and learning. Here are my three evaluation prompts and some of their responses: 

What did you find to be most valuable from today’s workshop? 

  • Changing the mind set of traditional thinking in schools.
  • Giving kids a chance to be thinking and problem solving on their own – that’s relevance.
  • Looking at rigorous and relevant thinking skills in action.
  • Innovative uses of technology in the classroom.
  • Simply having students follow a process is not relevant learning.
  • The importance of rigorous thought and the creative thinking process.
  • It’s not enough to simply use technology – it needs to be used to support rigorous thinking.
  • These are questions we need to be asking ourselves, daily.
  • A multimedia presentation, with a participatory focus on the big picture of learning.
  • I liked the questions for board members format – will be easier to report back to my colleagues.
  • Education will need to change to reflect the information age.
  • You used the techniques you were teaching, which was very helpful.
  •  Eye opening and Thought-provoking.

What was a frustration you had today?

  • Public schools have a multitude of mandates which tie our hands.
  • How will we measure problem solving and creative thinking in the context of NCLB testing mandates?
  • The process of applying technology for learning moves more slowly than the technology developments themselves.
  • Legislators don’t understand these concepts.
  • This talk is best directed at teachers and administrators. Boards don’t want to be perceived as micro-managing educational methods.
  • Would have liked to spend more time doing TurningPoint surveys.
  • This information has been around for along time and little has changed.
  • How do we provoke the state and their testing regiment to reflect on the need for higher level thinking and not regurgitating?
  • How do we get this information to our legislators in away that makes them think?

How will today’s workshop impact your school board planning?

  • I will use some of these questions in discussions with our superintendent.
  • Bring our planning into the 21st century.
  • We need to think more about relevant 21st century skill development.
  • I do process agenda for our board work retreats and I’m more aware that we need to hold ourselves to rigorous analysis of the products of our district.
  • We need to think more about the “how” than the “what” of instruction. 
  • It will help me to formulate questions to ask myself and the district – are we 21st C ready?
  • Your example of toddlers categorizing means we need to ask more about higher-level thinking at lower grade levels.
  • We will continue to collaborate and refine our goals.
  • Ask better questions – demand better answers. That includes of ourselves and our planning process.
  • We need to prepare our students for a future of thinking, creating, exploring and collaborating.
  • How do we get this approach throughout the system, so students are not penalized for learning outside the established system?
  • We need to re-think our educational model and priorities.

Image credit: flickr/ Wolfgang Staudt

Posted on

Free the Information (in Museums and Schools)

Museums share at least one thing in common with schools. They have traditionally functioned as repositories of information. 
Visit a museum and you can view the information (art) that a curator has selected, organized, and presented. Often its significance and meaning will be explained to you in a wall label. In the traditional school, curriculum experts select information that teachers organize and present to students. Most teachers talk a lot, so students spend much of their day being told what information is important and why. Later they sit at their desks and fill out worksheets that reinforce what they just heard.
Schools, museums and other traditional information gatekeepers (think newspapers, publishers, etc) got along fine when they were able to control information and its flow. The one who “owned the presses” decided what was important. Most of us were accustomed to this asymmetry of information production and distribution. After all, it was much easier to read a book than to write and publish one.
 
What is “revolutionary” about the information revolution is not all the “cool” new technologies – it’s the fact that the information monopoly enjoyed by the gatekeepers has been broken. We can now control the information we access, save, alter and share.
 
Today’s New York Times features a story about how museums are re-thinking their web presence in light of the rapidly changing information landscape. “To Ramp Up Its Web Site, MoMA Loosens Up” NY Times March 4, 2009.

The museum wants the site to transform how the public interacts with an institution that can sometimes seem forbidding and monolithic.

“The notion of opening up the museum’s singular voice is really the driving thought behind this,” said Allegra Burnette, creative director of digital media for the museum, who has been working on the redesign for a year and a half. She added, “We’re opening the doors, though not necessarily throwing them open.”

The site, which she and other MoMA officials stress is a work in progress, will now include what its designers call a “social bar” at the bottom, which when clicked will expand to show images and other information that users can “collect” and share after registering for a free account at the Web site (moma.org). A user could build a portfolio of Walker Evans photographs or Elizabeth Murray paintings and send them to friends, Ms. Burnette said. The site will also eventually make it easy for users both casual and scholarly to trace lines of interest, digging up more information about works from publications and curators, she added.

 
So what lessons can school learn from MoMA? 

Put aside all the social networking / Web 2.0 features MoMA is adding to its site, and it’s really about giving viewers more functionality and control over how they interact with the museum’s collection. MoMA and other museums realize that they will need to stop treating their audience as passive consumers of information. 

I’m not suggesting schools need to run out and build new 2.0 websites. Actually we already have an audience of students sitting in the classroom who can interact with information and each other without the need to go online. What educators need to do is rethink what teaching and learning is all about. It’s no longer “teaching as talking.” Nor is the purpose of school to simply dispense information to students. Schools need to function as thoughtfully designed learning environments where students can investigate information and be given a chance to reflect (with their peers) on what they learned and how they see themselves progressing as learners. That can be done with a variety of technologies including pen and paper. A social network is already sitting in the classroom.
 
Image credit: flick/Bonnie BonBon
Posted on

Is Visuality the New Literacy?

Kevin Kelly’s recent piece “Becoming Screen Literate” (NY Times 11/23/08)  details our transition from text literacy to screen literacy. This movement has great implication for education. Information in our schools is organized in text-based lineal fashion. Our students live in a mosaic, imaged-based world in which visuality has become the new literacy.

Screens are everywhere. YouTube videos and Flickr images have become rich databases of component images and videos for yet new mash-ups and user-generated content. Kelly predicts this visual content will soon surpass our linguistic content as new tools will enable users to search, copy, modify and reassemble visual content with near word-processor efficiency.
 
Kelly writes, 

The rich databases of component images form a new grammar for moving images… After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images. 

Below a TimeTube mashup creates a genealogy of most popular user-generated videos tagged Global Warming. 

Posted on

Start Your Digital Scrapbook – I Collect SpamHaiku


Spam Haiku

I’ve found a tool that makes blogging too easy. Tumblr let’s you quickly post thoughts, dialogue, quotes, images and videos. The account is free. Sign up and start posting your content. The engine lacks design and management tools, but that’s a plus. It’s a format designed for short-form posting without the commentary. You don’t have to worry about creating a blog that that takes over your life. If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

I started a tumblelog a few weeks ago called SpamHaiku. Each morning I spend a few moments with my spam before I hit delete.  I’ve long admired the pointless subject lines – now with a quick copy / paste – I assemble a “poem.” I pick the morning’s most outlandish spam “author” and give them credit for the post. Here’s a few  of  “my creations.”

Pounds down
Mood up
Punishable footprint
Frown bereft
— Fern Fry

Goldfish sleepily
watch his pounds
disappear.
— Birdsboro Boone

Technology continues to lower the barrier for entry to the new media. The new copy / paste culture fosters a bottom-up takeover of the information flow. Will we upload more than we download?  Will the audience become the show?