Taste of Tech

My brother and I had walkie-talkies when we were kids. I think we got them for Christmas one year. They were red, ran on 9-volt batteries, and had ridiculously long antennas. We used them constantly until the batteries died. Then, they fell into disuse (we never seemed to have a battery surplus). In the half-dozen years that followed, occasionally one would be discovered, and a new battery installed. The trouble was that we never seemed to be able to find both walkie-talkies at the same time. Since the range was pathetically short, about all we could do with one of them was listen to static. So it would go back in the toy box. A few months later, the other one would show up, but by that time the first one was lost. We never seemed to get both working at the same time after that first Christmas.

Years later, when I signed up for my first email account, I didn’t really have a good idea of what I was going to do with it. In truth, I just needed an account on the university’s mainframe so I could participate in some online forums. I didn’t even know I had an email account until several weeks later.

The new account, and the discovery of what it could do, weren’t much help to me. I didn’t know anyone else who had an email address, so there wasn’t anyone to write to. Eventually, I met some other people on campus who had email accounts, so I started writing to them. It was a year or more before I started emailing people who lived more than half a mile away.

Last week, I spent some time with a group of teachers in a class on developing personal learning networks. We focused on collaborative tools and technologies, like social bookmarking, Internet telephony, video conferencing, and shared online productivity tools. I talked a lot about my network. I’ve met a lot of smart people who have similar interests and goals, and I can rely on them to help when I’m in a pinch. As we went through the various tools, I tried to describe how I use that tool to interact with my network. I’ve certainly learned more from my network over the last two years than I ever learned in a college classroom.

The teachers liked the tools, and immediately starting thinking of ways to use them in their classes. That’s great. I expected them to do that. But they were less keen on the idea of a professional learning network. Sure, they can share their bookmarks with other Delicious users. But no one they know uses Delicious. It’s great that they can use Skype to conference with other second grade teachers, but they don’t know any other second grade teachers who use Skype. They only have one walkie-talkie. There’s no one to talk to.

The solution — I think — is blogging. Nearly everyone I interact with online in a professional way is someone I met through blogging. When I started writing a blog, I wrote it for my district staff. Most of them don’t read it. I think it was a year or more before anyone read my blog who doesn’t live in my house. At the same time, though, I started reading other blogs. I commented on those, and contributed to some conversations. Occasionally, I’ve posted on things people are interested in, and I’ve received some comments on this blog. That’s how I started building connections.

The same could be said for other “pull” technologies. I’ve met some people by listening to their podcasts (most notably those crazy people at EdTechTalk). I’ve found some new friends through Twitter, too, mostly by looking at who the people I’m following are following. Take recommendations from people you trust and respect.

It’s hard to get traction. It’s hard to see how interactive technologies work when you don’t have anyone to interact with. If you work at it, you’ll develop your own network. It starts with a lot of reading and a little writing. But if your network is as good as mine is, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

This week, we’re offering two professional development classes on using technology in the classroom. In the first class, we’re covering a series of interactive web tools including Protopage, Blogging, Podcasting, Wikis, and Moodle.

Because he introduces this better than anyone else in our district, we convinced middle school teacher Joe Zenir to introduce this for us. Here’s the video of his presentation:

It’s been an RSS day. It started last night, actually, when I was trying to figure out how to get an RSS feed of an entire Google Reader account into a Protopage (still haven’t figured that one out). Then, there was the challenge of helping my wife get an RSS feed of her Twitter messages on her blog. This morning, two colleagues and I were playing with RSS feeds for delicious tags and feeds for Technorati searches. I returned to the office and took a call from the developer of our content management system. He wanted to change the XML chicklet icon we were using to the standard RSS icon. We also talked about adding some explanation of what RSS is to the web site.

I’ve explained RSS at least twice before (here and here). Basically, it allows you to automate the checking of web sites, blogs, and other web resources for updates. When something new gets posted, you see the content in your feed reader.

I always use CNN as an example. You can get an RSS feed for any of their news categories. If I just want world news, or education news, I can subscribe to those feeds. Then, when something new is posted, it shows up in my feed reader.

Here’s the interesting thing, though. Take a look at this image of CNN’s home page from August 29, 2007:

Now, look at this image from CNN’s home page, May 2, 2008:

See what isn’t there? The RSS Feed link. You used to be able to click on that link in the upper-right corner of any CNN page. It then took you to a page listing all of the available RSS feeds. It explained what RSS feeds are, and how you can use them. That link isn’t there any more.

You can still get to the feeds though. All you have to do is scroll to the bottom of the page. Click on “Tools & Widgets.” That will take you to a page that will try to get you to install the Google toolbar widget, and the desktop alerter, and other things you don’t need. Scroll to the bottom of that page, and you’ll see an “RSS Page” link under “Other Products.” Click on that link and you’ll find the old list of RSS feeds available on the CNN site. Easy, right?

So if RSS makes it so easy to share information and aggregate content from multiple sources, why did CNN make it so hard to find?

Of course, I can only speculate about CNN’s motives, but I would guess that it has to do with advertising revenue. See, if I grab an RSS feed from CNN’s site, and I put it on my Protopage, that means I’m reading CNN’s content on my own page. That’s what RSS is for. Maybe I have CNN on one part of the screen, and the New York Times somewhere else, and some other news sources and blogs in other places. But by not going to CNN’s web site, I’m not seeing their advertisements. So they’re getting less traffic on their web site, and generating less advertising revenue. That hurts them financially, so they’re no longer actively encouraging people to do that. At least, that’s my theory.

And I hope it works. The alternative would be to put advertising in the feed, so I would get today’s headlines along with a few advertisements on my page. That would set a very unpleasant precident for news feeds, and I don’t think any of us really want to move in that direction.

We can’t keep up. We can’t know about everything. Just because something’s famous, even in the relatively small world of education and technology, that doesn’t mean I have ever heard of it.

Sure, I know about Creative Commons. If you license your work with a CC license, you allow others to use it, with some limitations. You can require attribution. You can specify that derivatives can’t be made from it. You can restrict people to non-commercial use. You can allow people to change it, but only if they redistribute it with the same license.

There’s lots of flexibility with Creative Commons, and it fits well with the collaborative attitude of the education world. We work together. We share resources. If you want to print out one of my blog posts and pass it out to your staff, be my guest. If you want to use my something I’ve written for a class or workshop you’re teaching on blogging, go for it. If you can find some value in my work, I think that’s wonderful. It would be nice if you give me credit, though. And if you’re going to be profiting from it, you should contact me first. Oh, and if you make improvements to it, you should also let people share them in the same way. So I can use an “attribution, non-commercial, share-alike Creative Commons license” for my blog. And there it is, over in the sidebar. So copy away.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

Last night, I heard about the famous Mayer and Bettle animation that explains Creative Commons.

This animation was created by Pete Foley, with music by Chris Perren. It was coordinated by Elliott Bledsoe, from Creative Commons Australia. And apparently, everyone on the Internet has seen it. Except me. And maybe you.

Oh, and the reason I heard about it last night is because there’s a new sequel to the first animation that goes into a little more depth and focuses on how to make money by giving away your work for free. IMHO, it’s not as good as the original, but it still may be worth a look.

I attended a meeting last week that wasn’t a complete waste of time. A shock, I know. Sure, it did take 45 minutes to drive the 13 miles to the meeting. It was rush hour, after all. All told, the trip took me 4 1/2 hours, which included about 2 1/2 hours of presentations.

The presentations were mostly of the endless-Powerpoint-bullet variety. While they did contain a few nuggets of really useful information, that information was more than covered in the 150 pages (!) of printed materials provided. Still, the presenters had something to say, and they were well prepared. That made this meeting better than most.

The valuable part, of course, was the informal interaction with the other participants. In all, there were about 100 people in attendance. I talked to other tech coordinators about Internet filtering, and learned about a new method students are using to bypass proxy servers. We also discussed various approaches to professional development, online learning with Moodle, and e-rate filing procedures. None of these were on the agenda for the day.

It’s not new for the informal bits of meetings and conferences to be more valuable than the structured parts. Many people express the idea that the best part of a conference is the discussion that takes place in the hallway, or the person you meet while waiting for a keynote to start, or the breakout session you attended by mistake after getting the room number wrong. These serendipitous moments are the best part.

So why do we bother with the formal agenda? If the whole event were structured to take advantage of these informal moments, it would certainly save a lot of planning time, and everyone would get more out of it, right? That’s the concept behind an unconference. While the idea has been around for decades, they’ve started to become really popular in the last few years.

The concept is an acknowledgment that, in most cases, the expertise present in the audience far outpaces the expertise of the people on stage. Dave Winer explained it better than I can, but I’ll give it a shot. Everyone in the audience becomes a “participant.” The leader isn’t a presenter. He doesn’t have scores of Powerpoint slides prepared. He knows something about the topic (yes, there’s a topic pre-decided). He leads a discussion, asks questions, and encourages people in the room to participate. No one gets to dominate the discourse. Different points of view are expressed and challenged. At the end of it all, we have a broader picture of the topic, based on the collective experience of the participants, that is far more valuable than anything a single person could have presented.

Now, what if we take this a step further? Rather than meeting in a conference room at a hotel or convention center, why can’t we meet online? We have all of the tools. Combine Skype, Yugma, Skrbl, Google Docs, and Ustream, all of which are free. The session can be recorded, so people unable to attend can watch it later. I don’t have to sit in traffic, so a one hour meeting actually takes one hour. Plus, anyone in the world can attend.

It’s going to take a while, but this is going to change how we interact professionally.