tips on liveblogging a conference

I’m packing up for a whirlwind tour of Philadelphia as I hang out with the National Writing Project, the MacArthur Foundation, and NCTE. (In case you’re into backchanneling or can’t attend, Twitter hashtags for NWP and NCTE appear to have settled on #NWPAM09 and #NCTE–I’ll see you there.)

I’ll be co-presenting on two panels, and the rest of the time I’ll be liveblogging the conference. You can liveblog too! It’s a lot of work but the payoff is big; most significantly, you get to start the reflecting on panels–what we always say we’re going to do, once the conference is over, but end up shunting off to the side because we came home to so much work that needs to be taken care of immediately and the cats need to be fed and the water pipes busted and there’s a huge spider in the bathtub and brb freaking out

ok back

Liveblogging takes some focus, and it takes some planning. Below, I’ve included some resources to get you started if this is your first time, or to refresh you with some good tips if you’ve liveblogged before.

• The indispensable “Tips for Live Bloggers,” by Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman. Read this one first; it offers big tips (don’t transcribe an entire talk; just grab the main points and think about what people who weren’t there would want to know and could understand without being there) and small (get there early, sit in the back so your typing doesn’t distract)

• The Art of Live Blogging, from blogher: Includes pre-conference strategies and planning tips.

• ProBlogger’s Tips on Live Blogging an Event, including links to other live blogging tip sites.

That’s a good starter list. I’ll over a few tips of my own, from my experiences live blogging a handful of events:

• Do your homework before the event starts. If you plan to liveblog a keynote, find out the speaker’s background, grab a bio and a picture, and paste it into a blogpost. This will save you tons of time, give you a graphic for your post, and help inform your understanding of the talk.
• Add a “my thoughts” section at the end of every post. This can be as short as a few sentences, written immediately after the event, panel, or keynote. Readers came to your blog either because you’re the only one liveblogging the event or because they want to know your opinion on the event. Either way, this is a key aspect of the live blogger’s vocation: synthesizing the event for others.
• If you’re bored by or don’t understand a panel, give up. If it can’t hold your attention, it’s probably not going to make much of a post anyway, and your time is better spent planning for the next session you plan to liveblog.
• Direct traffic to your blog using Twitter or other backchannel tools. This one’s obvious–you want to generate a community, both among attendees and non-attendees, around the events. You get to provide a useful service, too: Describing the events that many attendees won’t have been able to attend.

That’s all. See you at NWP and NCTE! I’ll be here:

Session: D.44 – 2:30 pm to 3:45 pm 11/20/2009	Format: Panel
Room: Convention Center/Room 105B, Street Level	Topic: 21st-Century Literacy
Level(s): Secondary (9-12)

Title: Reading in a Participatory Culture: New Media Literacy Practices and Discursive Assessment Strategies for Critical and Creative Engagement with Classic Texts
Web 2.0 practices are expanding our definitions of literacy, providing new tools for teaching classic texts, and transforming educational assessment. This panel examines these profound shifts towards participatory approaches, while also addressing concerns with traditional literacies and test-based accountability. 
 

Chair:	Michelle Honeyford, Indiana University, Bloomington
Presenter:	Jenna McWilliams, Indiana University, Bloomington, Rebecca Rupert, Aurora Alternative High School, Bloomington, Indiana, Lynn Sykes, Wareham High School, Wareham, MA

liveblogging the Home Inc Conference: keynote speaker Alan November

From Alan November’s website:

Alan November is an international leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. He has helped schools, governments and industry leaders improve the quality of education through technology.

His opener:
“I used to think I knew the truth. I don’t know it anymore. So whatever I say is only good enough to criticize.”

Here’s why, according to Alan November, we’ve been able to spend over $10 billion on putting technology into schools over the last decade without making any gains on learning. He pulls much of his arguments from Shoshana Zuboff’s 1989 book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.

1. The real solution isn’t bolting technology on top of what we used to do. November pointed to Zuboff’s notion of “automating,” which is the process of using technology to automatically transfer information. “When you automate,” November said, “at best, you only get incremental improvement. Not surprisingly to me, you often get a decline in quality.

According to November, connecting our classrooms to the Internet has lowered the quality of education int he U.S. Plagiarism has skyrocketed. “Everywhere I go,” he said, “teachers complain about how students are taking the easiest route to learning” through copying and pasting and other plagiaristic approaches.

2. The real issue isn’t technology; the real issue is control. We have teachers and administrators controlling learning and we need to ask how well (or poorly) that serves the needs of the learners.

Here are the solutions November offers:

Zuboff’s notion of informating: Giving people access to information they’ve never had before. “I’ve been to schools that are technology-rich and information-poor. Teachers don’t have the right information at the right time to do the right job. Students don’t have the right information at the right time to do the right job. Parents do not have the right information–ever, hardly.”

Identify new opportunities for collaboration. This is, according to November, a mark that you’re beginning to use technology well.
“The one-room schoolhouse was a great idea. We need to go back to that. The very structure of the school system is what’s in the way. That structure is a control model.”

If you do those two things well, November argued, then more and more people become self directed. They don’t need an organization to tell them what to do. That’s the ultimate skill, according to November.

“One of the most important questions we need to ask is: Who should own the learning?” Since technology is typically used to reinforce teacher control, we need to think of new strategies for using technology to shift control over learning toward learners and, November argues, parents. He argued that the best thing schools can do is to “build capacity in every family as centers of learning.

“But I can say this until I’m blue. i don’t think anybody’s going to do this–because it falls outside of the boundaries of the current collaboration people have.”

Time? Money? Energy? “It’s all red herrings,” said November. “It’s all about control!”

November says the biggest technology from his perspective that can help lead to a shift in control is Skype.

my thoughts on November’s keynote:
It’s refreshing to see his energy and enthusiasm about rethinking the use of technology in the classroom. I worry, though, that his stance on transferring agency to the family could just shift the control issues from the schools to the family structure. In brief, it’s not just control that makes schools worrisome institutions; it’s the colonizing effect of middle class values on members of non-dominant classes and ethnicities. Collaborate with families and you get the same old divide we’ve been seeing for much more than the last decade. Middle class kids will get inculcated with middle class values, which we know lead to success; lower class kids will learn a different set of values, thereby reifying the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Add to this the increasing influence of new media technologies–and the participation gap that Henry Jenkins has pointed to–and this concern becomes even more vital.

Control, after all, is much less simple (and simplistic) than we try to make it appear. Add to that the fact that institutional control has nuances that aren’t easy to talk about in the keynote structure.

“If you don’t have the right mission,” November said, “it doesn’t matter what technology you have.” Yes, and we need to consider the broader (if tacit and unexplored) mission of the American education system.

Sakai 09 Panel: Closing the Deal

Closing the Deal: Seeing Sakai Adopting as a Sales Process
Sarah “Intellagirl” Smith-Robbins, Senior Director of Emerging Technologies, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
Roger Henry, Instructional Technology Consultant, Indiana University

Roger and a Back Story
Roger is, first of all, awesome. He started his presentation by trying to figure out what kinds of support people at IU would need to adopt OnCourse, which is what Sakai is called at IU. He met with faculty, administrators, deans, and staff to try to find strategies for encouraging adoption; and he also reached out to Kelley Executives affiliated with IU’s Kelley School of Business. He explained that he presented some of his ideas about the results of this at last year’s Sakai Conference in Paris.

Also, Roger added that there’s more backstory to last year’s Sakai presentation in Paris–he was trapped there for three weeks.

“But don’t worry,” he added, “I consoled myself.”

Sarah’s Presentation: The difference between higher ed and executive ed
First of all, Sarah is awesome. She points out key aspects that differentiate traditional higher ed from executive education. Here are her key points about the differences:

• The “students” are different (for one thing, they don’t want to be called “students”).
• The learning goals are different. in a traditional classroom, the instructor defines the learning goals; in executive education, students come to the program with needs.
• The courses are different. The topics are usually very narrow and specialized to a specific business issue. They also bring their own culture, instead of integrating into the IU culture that’s already established.
• The expectations for Return on Investment (ROI) are different. If you have students who are working adults and paying for their own education, they have different expectations than the typical undergrads. In executive education, the transaction is linked to economic value. “I think we’re going to see more of this kind of expectation among students, as well,” she added. “We’re already seeing students push bak and say ‘This isn’t directly related to the job I want, so I’m not going to take it.'”

The Circumstances

• Exec ed clients aren’t students in the university system.
• Most companies are looking for online learning solutions and have failed. (Sarah explains: People find software, then try to solve a problem instead of identifying the problem first and finding software to solve it.)
• Exec Ed courses are short and constructed on short notice.
• University faculty aren’t typically able to build unique settings for Exec Ed

OnCourse: The Solution

• Supported by a large university system
• Available globally 24/7 (and also scalable)
• Familiar to faculty
• Flexible enough to accommodate a range of learning experiences

One significant shift, Sarah said, was offering a new kind of learning experience. Typical corporate approaches align with the “death by PowerPoint” approach–everybody sits in a room while somebody talks at them and everybody just tries to get through the day.
“So the first question people ask,” she said, “Is ‘Can I upload my PowerPoints to it?'”
This is one of the key issues they address on a regular basis.

Sarah tosses up Here Comes Everybody and I swoon with joy. Seriously, you guys, read this book.

“Promise Tool Bargain,” she says. At which point I link you to every blogpost I’ve written on exactly this framework.

Sarah points out the promise of OnCourse, and Roger stands up to talk about the tool. He is, he explains, a choral conductor by training, and his research focuses on how the tools we use shape our practice.

“Most of the problems I hear at IU,” he said, “are tied to using the tool.”
A lot of questions, he said, are also about what will happen when things go wrong.

He points out that a big part of offering the tool is linked to ensuring people that when problems arise, they will be resolved as quickly as possible (and gives the example of a flurry of emails that went out last night at 11:30 about a problem somebody was having; it was solved by the morning).

Another key, Roger said, is managing expectations: “We’re not selling a perfect tool.” It will break, it will slow down, it will go down for maintenance, and the key is to be as responsive and communicative about these things as possible.

The Bargain
Sarah speaks to the bargain: “Faculty have to engage with learning the tool in a new learning paradigm. They can’t use a lecture format and expect it to be as good as or better than a classroom.

“Using a tool that is so transparently requiring participation can cause some issues with the expectations, both of faculty and exec ed students.”

Another part of the bargain, she said, is being honest about the weaknesses and problems with the tool as well.

Sarah said she uses the “promise, tool, bargain” paradigm to approach faculty issues.
Example: When faculty says “my students are not participating” Sarah asks where did the bargain break down.

Did you not promise they would be evaluated on their participation? Are you giving them lame questions? Are you using the wrong tool to facilitate the discussion? Have you explained to them the requirements and the energy required to put in in order to get a good conversation out of it?

Another example: If a CEO says he talked to someone on the phone and got an unprofessional interaction, she asks: Did we promise to offer professionalism at all times?

***my thoughts***
Of course I’m thrilled to hear Clay Shirky mentioned–and, especially, the “promise, tool, bargain” paradigm that I love so well. Though Sarah and Roger pointed to the value of this framework for engaging executive clients, this approach has tons of potential for bringing people in to the open education movement that Vijay Kumar pointed to in his opening keynote this morning.

Sakai 09 Panel: Faculty Success Stories

Encouraging successful teaching with technology

Description: To foster innovative teaching and learning with technology, Indiana University’s technology services (UITS) widely shares stories of successful teaching and learning with technology. The sharing process relies on principles of Appreciative Inquiry, strategically chosen communication channels, and a sustainable system to generate stories.

Presenters: Michael Morrone, IU; Jan Holloway, IU; John Gosney, IU

Indiana University calls its Sakai program OnCourse and these IU faculty and staff have worked to collect stories of faculty uses of the tool. Their data collection strategy was to gather stories.

This panel, presented in clear language with good use of multimedia materials, makes the important point that institutions need to have a common language for discussion technology use–and that this language needs to extends across departments, programs, and expertises. This means that IT guys, designers, faculty, and students need to be able to communicate easily.

Michael Morrone: “When I started doing interviews, I learned that faculty use Sakai in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of good energy that needs to be harnessed so Sakai can be harnessed.”

Michael starts with the following clip from Star Trek to suggest that we shouldn’t be slaves to our technologies.

“There’s a big divide and a lot of diversity in the way faculty come to the use of tehcnology. We talk about technology in very different ways, even among the faculty. When you start looking at faculty vs. technology, the divide in how we talk is even bigger.”

How do you get across the river?
Michael Morrone shows a photo taken from his office of a river and asks: How would you get across the river? Then he asks: How would you get all of us across the river?
One person can cross in tons of ways; lots of people cross in lots of different ways. If we all wanted to get across the river, we have to have a shared language. We have to be able to talk about the problem in the same way.

One of our hopes for today’s session is to find out how we can get ppl at our institutions to talk about teaching and learning with technology in similar ways. If we can do that, then the teaching with technology doesn’t become something we fear. It becomes something we embrace.

How do we do this?
“We did it with stories.”

Why stories?
Stories brand tehcnology mission through shared language
“People don’t like to think of a university as a business. They don’t like to think of students as consumers. But you have to brand because if you don’t, people think about you how they want to think about you. Successful corporations have an image and an identity, and “your technology has to have an identity on campus.”

Why stories? “Humans thrive on stories…. Stories are a way to start dialogue, to get people interested. This is a way to create conversation, intrigue, dialogue. Once we start doing that, then together, we start constructing the language that will work for us as a community.”

Morrone showed this video of Randy Isaacson, associate professor of Educational Psychology at IU South Bend, who uses Oncourse CL to teach his students about metacognition.

Key points from the video:
1. You have to have experienced faculty.
2. You have to use technology in tons of different ways.

John Gosney is up next: Once we gather the stories, how do we get them out to the IU community?
A key strategy is a “multi-channel approach”

• OnCourse “announce” listserv/other mailing lists
• Teaching center consultants
• Weekly “e-news” (264k distribution including Big Ten and beyond)
• Internal communications (uits.news.edu, podcast portal)

Second video: Kathy Lay, Asisstant Professor of Social Work.

**side note: I am a subscriber to the uits.news.edu listserve and I NEVER read it. Though I imagine I will start reading it now.**

Getting faculty engaged: some strategies

• Developing “grassroots” faculty conversations (faculty-to-faculty)
• Normalize IT use (comparisons and conversations give people baselines and ideas)–we don’t want it to seem so complicated that it becomes onerous. Indeed, Gosney points out, even being cutting edge may not always be necessary–a cutting edge tool requires work to learn, and that’s not always useful.
• Change nature of conversations so that language is highly relevant to teaching and learning as opposed to “tool based.”

Gosney makes the important point that video often works much better for faculty than text. “And the technology is very inexpensive, simple to use…and once you film it, it’s incredibly easy to upload in Sakai.”

Question: Communications seem very one-way (listservs, email communications, etc.). Can you talk about thoughts about how you might foster more discourse on these topics?
John: “My boss (Stacy Morrone) brings up a very good point.” We set up a one-way conversation to limit negative comments–not because we didn’t want to hear it but because we didn’t want to foster” a negative space. “I think a real challenge is trying to get that ongoing kind of discussion, and we can blanket the universtiy, and in many cases we do…but until we get that kind of grassroots level faculty-to-faculty communication…that’s what we’re really after. And once that starts, the rest kind of takes care of itself. It’s a real challenge getting this communication and sustaining it.”

Think / Pair / Share
Current practices for showcasing teaching with technology
Process for identifying best practices
Identify possible stories that are appropriate for your institution
Identify other criteria / guidelines for stories at your institution
Should success stories be housed intra-university? How?

**my thoughts**
I’ve been working with OnCourse at IU for the last several weeks with my advisor, Dan Hickey. Despite my engagement with a variety of classroom and other educational communities, I find OnCourse somewhat onerous in terms of developing fluency with its features. Stories in themselves are helpful, but they can’t magically lead to engagement with the technology itself. I see OnCourse has a lot of .pdf’s and other “getting started” materials, but I’m not positive this is sufficient, especially for faculty who are anxious about working with new technologies.

I happen to be the kind of person who doesn’t read instruction manuals or watch instructional videos–if I can’t figure it out on my own, I don’t bother. I’m going to spend some time working with OnCourse after this conference, then I’ll get back to you.

Sakai 09 Megasites panel: my reach exceeds my grasp

Liveblogging Sakai panel: MegaSite Lessons Learned

Session Description: This session will present examples from three universities demonstrating the unique challenges associated with mega sites– single sites serving hundreds, even thousands, of students. What kinds of needs are we being asked to meet at this scale? Which tools are the best fit? What customizations were employed? Finally, what do mega-sites need from 3.0?

Presenters: Diana Perpich, University of Michigan; John Leasia, University of Michigan; Stephen Marquard, University of Cape Town; Margaret Ricci, Indiana University; David Martinez, Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Margaret Ricci: “Mega Sites or, as I call it, shoving a round peg in a square hole. Doing this makes Sakai do things that…it’s a big stretch.”

…

I’ve learned something important in this session: There is a good deal of information about Sakai that is out of my range of understanding. It’s possible that this session was just misplaced–I suspect I’d have a better sense of the connotations of megasites once I have a sense of a regular old normalsite–and it’s possible that the panelists were rushing to make up for Vijay Kumar’s keynote going 15 minutes over schedule. It’s also possible that my next session will be chosen to give my confidence level the powerboost it now needs.

Sakai 09 Keynote: Vijay Kumar

Keynote: “Learning OUTed: Open Ubiquitous Transformational”

Vijay Kumar is MIT’s Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, Director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, and a member of the Advisory Committee for MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. He was also an editor of Opening Up Education, a new and key text for the open education movement. (Dr. Kumar’s full bio can be accessed here.)
“My god,” Dr. Kumar says, “I thought…this is our Woodstock!”

Remarking on the number of new attendees, Dr. Kumar said:
“There’s at least a 50% growth (new users) and that speaks volumes of the strength of this community–which is why it’s a particular privilege for me to be here because Sakai’s an important marker for something I’m quite passionate about: the open education movement. And yes indeed, it is a movement.”

Kumar identified the open education movement one that’s both global and accelerating. He notes MIT’s OpenCourseWare project as a key momentum-driver, but a wide range of other proejcts too, including work in the k-12, publication, and textbook sectors in addition to higher education. “We need to make sure,” he adds, “that this movement doesn’t die or meet the future that so many movements have faced.”

Going back to the title: Learning OUTed:
“I think one of the most significant impacts that this growing education movement has had is really making learning very ,very visible–learning in all its flavors…in all its diversity… and suddenly attention is shifting in focus. I think this is the really sustainable impact of the open ed movement.

“For me, what’s significant, why I think this is indeed a really dramatic movement, is because it’s become part of the discourse of educational change–nationally, globally, whether it’s at the micro level or at the level of national or international crusades.

“The fact that this has become a part of the discourse for educational change…is what really signifies the impact of this movement–that this movement is really something to be reckoned with.”

Pointing to Opening Up Education, the book he recently edited, he asks this question: “How can we advance teaching and learning by taking full advantage of open education?”

Kumar points to the “iron triangle” of access, quality, and cost–if you want to increase, for example, access, typically either the quality suffers or the cost has to go up. He points to the need for gatekeeping if you want high quality.

“One of the things about open education is that it offers the opportunity to do better things with more quality at lower cost and increased access. It makes the iron triangle much more flexible. It has the ability to render the previously inflexible triangle flexible.”

The implications of the iron triangle are much more significant for developing companies and large institutions, he said, but also relevant in developed countries.

Open Education Vision Elements
Kumar points to two areas where Open Education has the most vision-changing promise:
Blended Learning: “When we talk about blended learning–and this isn’t a new notion–I’m talking about how open education enables intelligent combinations of the physical and virtual, formal education with informal education…”this is one of the transcendental promises of open learning.”

Boundary-less Education: “I am not talking just about traditional geographical and political boundaries, but boundaries that are much more subtle Between disciplines, between research and learning, between on campus and off campus….in fact, there’s a lot of talk about lifelong learning. I’m talking about all the boundaries that exist between these sectors…between living and learning. And the possibilities of open education presents the transcending of these boundaries in multiple ways.”

Dr. Kumar points to multiple examples from MIT, including OpenCourseWare, the Spoken Lecture Browder, an iLab, an open-ed project based at MIT but open for use in multiple sites (therefore boundary-less). Labs in general are expensive, he points out, not just in terms of actual cost but also in terms of the learner’s time. One of the criteria of good courseware is that it is efficient on learners’ time. iLabs offers a strategy for addressing latency–the phenomenon of a class followed by a lab two or three days later (during which time learners lose information).

One issue he points to is the problem that a lot of learning materials (esp. on blogs) is difficult to package for ready use. We need to consider viability and appropriateness of converting material into open resources.

Kumar adds: There’s a lot of assumption that making something available is making it usable, but unless we have ways to show the pedagogical underpinnings of a course, the educational value of some material is debatable–is in fact suspect.”

Design, Kumar explains, “is a very, very important influence in who participates in this open education revolution, and in terms of the kinds of choices we enable, and in terms of the kinds of things that can happen.” Just having things open is not enough, he explains, unless the design allows access.

Readiness for Opening Up Education: Organizational Cultural Factors
Running out of time, Kumar offers final comments in the following categories:

• Scarcity vs. Abundance (reliance on situated learning / push teaching vs. demand pull learning)
• Sense Making (ordering the digital disorder, pedagogical shifts [individual learning=collaborative, social learning], codevelopment of knowledge with learners)
• Accountability and Accreditation (massification implications for Quality and Preparation; Distributed; Open Knowledge and Learning)

Kumar ends with this quote:

“we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university–a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.” Charles M Vest, President Emeritus, MIT

**My thoughts**
Vijay Kumar is a big name in the open education movement, especially for anyone who’s done any reading or conferencing. I’m already a convert to the open education movement and therefore found his talk fascinating; but there was a mass of newbies in the audience, and this was a moment to grab and convert the fence-sitters. Even if it’s true (and I’d be willing to believe it) that everybody in the audience is already a fan of open education, I wish Kumar had spent more time galvanizing us around the notion of community. As Michael Korcuska noted, attendees came from all over the world. We’re meeting for the first and, for some of us, the only time–we’re converging in the name of open source, open technology, and open education. Let’s value, admire, and rally around the ethos, the spirit of open education, that brings us together. Kumar pointed to this in discussing the newly flexible iron triangle, but while that hits me right in my logic center, I’m also here to get hit in my passion center.

Okay, that’s the mini-critique. What I’ll add is that Kumar is a fascinating, smart, excellent speaker whose ability to talk about complicated, difficult issues in the economics of education is impressive. Mind-blowing, really. As noted in the Twitter conference feed,

You can follow Sakai tweets with the hashtag #Sakai09.

Sakai 09 Opening Remarks: Michael Korcuska

What follows is a liveblog of the opening remarks for the 10th Sakai Conference, July 8-10, in Boston, MA.

Opening remarks began with Michael Korcuska, the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. (Here’s his Sakai blog.) Some key points are below.

Keywords: collaborative, “software that is as good as any commercial product that’s available.”

“As good is not good enough” says Korcuska. “We want to make something that won’t just change the economics of an institution but something that will change how an academic community can choose its mission.”

“It’s not only a project..it’s also path. It includes free and open source softwar– not free as in no cost but free as in free from restrictions. We believe this kind of freedom is especially important to the mission of education.

“The Sakai path is the path of self-determination in many ways, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a lonely path. Sakai is also a community. We believe we have a great…strong community, and this community is the real strength of Sakai. It’s the reason why Sakai is helping so many organizations around the world today and why we know it’ll be even better than it is today.”

A few key points:

• Sakai 2.6.0 is ready (released post conference)
• Sakai 3 is starting to take shape
• New product development process (more visibility)

Tons of newbies are here, according to an informal poll Korcuska ran. That’s kinda cool, huh? Especially since it’s my first Sakai conference too.

Sakai Fellows, 2009/2010

• Ian Boston, University of Cambridge
• Jean-Francois Leveque, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie
• Nicolaas Matthijs, University of Cambridge
• Mathieu Plourde, University of Delaware
• Manice A. Smith, Three Canoes Consulting
• Steve Swinsburg, Lancaster University