K12 Online Webinar ... underlying pedagogies

9/19/2007 09:57:00 pm

Lani and I gave an overview of K12 Online from the perspective of developing personal learning networks. Lani made most of the slides, here they are:

There was a lively chat going on throughout our talk, which I think was the best part of the whole thing. The Discovery Educator Network hosts Webinars (seminars on the web) using WebEx software which supports a chat window for participants to talk to each other during the presentation and ask questions of the presenters. At the same time David Jakes was hosting a chatcast in skype and some folks (there were 50 people in the room at one point) were continuing the discussion over on twitter. Talk about your web 2.0 globally connected goodness! ;-)

We've also archived the presentation and various links and resources we discussed on the K12 Online 2007 Take Away Wiki. I captured the chat from the WebEx environment and archived it there. If anyone grabbed the skype chat please send it my way or drop it into the wiki yourself.

We also published a version of the presentation on Google's latest addition to the Google Docs suite, Presently (online collaborative presentation tool). While there are a number of bugs, or inconveniences, that need to be worked out of Presently (downloading a copy to your hard drive isn't straight forward, customizing slides background colour with a colour picker tool, live chat while two or more people collaborate on the doc are all features that need some improvement) it does have one very nice feature. When a presentation is published and simultaneously viewed by more than one person, live chat is automatically enabled. I hope the chat can be copied and saved, or perhaps just archived in a user's gmail account, but I really like the idea of a presentation with life after the presentation. If you head over there now, and someone else is watching it at the same time, you can chat with each other about it; live.

During the presentation I talked briefly about how using free online tools allows us control over time and space that we didn't have before. Learning can be shifted to any convenient time or space. With the the chat feature of Google Docs' new presentation tool, chatcasts can continue to be made, spontaneously. I hope if anyone does that they add the chats they create to the archive we've begun on the wiki.

This all turns around what I think are the emerging pedagogies related to teaching and learning with read/write web tools:

  • » Make thinking transparent.
  • » Publish artifacts of learning, particularly thoughts in the rough; we learn most from our mistakes.
  • » Create content and share it with the goal of educating others.
  • » Use tools that allow for shifting time and space for learning; facilitate "just in time" learning.
  • » ...

What underlying pedagogical principles to teaching with the read/write web would you add to this list?

Update
I just checked out the google docs chat feature in Presently. The chat text cannot be selected, copied or saved. That's not good. Another inconvenience that needs to be improved. ;-)

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10 comments

  1. We did get a perfect recording of the presentation on Webex! I'm going to figure out how to publish it and then I'll send you a link. Also, it looks like we can convert it to WMV and/or Flash, so we may be able to make it embeddable or a videocast...

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  2. Anonymous20/9/07 11:03

    That's fantastic Steve! Looking forward to seeing it published. ;-)

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  3. Darren,

    Disappointed we missed the webinar, as the last few Discovery Educator Network stuff I've done (Steve Dembo, Doug Johnson to name a couple) have been first rate. I'm sure this was as well. Life has a way of causing busy time, even in the third week of September. I'm commenting generally to thank you for the presentationm (that I haven't yet seen), but more specificall to just say how cool I think it is that even though we (some interested teachers and I) missed it, we can catch it again in not-real time, which I think is probably one of the big up-sides of what you were talking about in the presentation....Thanks again for all of the PD you offer so selflessly to so many teachers. It's appreciated. Have a great day!

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  4. Anonymous20/9/07 11:24

    Thank you Ryan. If we can extract an mp3 from the artifacts Steve publishes I might remix it into a slidecast. It will automatically update any embeded copy of the slideshow with the accompanying audio.

    Cheers!

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  5. I've just viewed your Flickr photos - http://flickr.com/photos/tags/pc30sf06/
    was it for a project? It is really neat! I am curious as to how you set up the activity. I am a high school math teacher (geometry/alg2/alg1)

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  6. www.lmmath.blogspot.com

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  7. It's not a perfect solution, but could someone be in charge of taking screen captures of the live chat, pasting them all together, and posting them with the presentation archive?

    My first thought was Jing, but lots of little screen captures would be annoying.

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  8. Darren,

    I'm taking your outlook for future pedagogy to heart. We've begun sharing some of the content we're producing for our teachers, with the public through Vimeo. I am hoping the example we set rubs-off on other teachers to share their own content material.

    http://www.vimeo.com/channel2361

    In a networked world, I agree, no need to reinvent the wheel everytime you have a need for good quality instructional content.

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  9. Susan: Your suggestion would work. Screen captures, or maybe several 5 min jing.com video captures might so the trick, but all these "work arounds" have a clunky feel to them. What we really need is for the good folks at Google to enable some way to capture the chat in their presentation tool.

    John: I took a quick look at your vimeo video about flickr and creative commons. Thanks for sharing this resource! You described a very similar process to what I do too. It's often sounds more difficult than it is to someone who has never used flickr in this way before. The next time I'm asked to explain this I'll just pouint them to your video. ;-)

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  10. As of last week, Google added a wonderful little Latex equation editor to Google Docs. Equations insert as images, but they are editable if double clicked. It also gives a nice way to learn the basics of Latex equation formatting which is useful in some corners of the web.

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