Did you notice this in your email? Mark your calendar now!
CILC Symposium
Don’t miss an opportunity to learn and share best practices, practical applications, and emerging trends.
Where K-20 videoconferencing and collaborative technology leaders connect, interact, and learn.
(Formerly the Keystone Conference)
November 13 & 14, 2007.
Learn more at www.cilcsymposium.org.
Here’s a new idea! Frazier Museum has started a blog about their distance learning program and they are still looking into purchasing equipment. So they are writing about the process of getting started with videoconferencing. If you check out their website it looks like they have really cool content. Looking forward to them getting up & running!
I just finished the Strengths Finder survey, required reading for Leadership Orientation next week. Some of the top strengths didn’t surprise me, but Input did. Here’s the short description of this strength:
People who are especially talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.
This explains my drive to blog! My work blog is a way to collect information in one place, to archive ideas, thoughts and answers to common questions. It’s also why I really want other people in the K12 videoconferencing world to be blogging. All those great ideas, experiences, projects and lesson ideas need to be shared! We shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel! We can learn so much from each other!
This also explains why I hate it when web pages disappear. I jump on over to Archive.org to find them and link to them again. Knowledge lost is a travesty! Even if it’s “old” knowledge in web years, it’s still good thinking! This applies mainly to articles I use in my online classes, and to collaborative videoconference project ideas.
I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a Leadership Moment. Curious, I investigated further and discovered this is a podcast you can subscribe to. There are two minute little clips with leadership thoughts to consider. Check it out!
Last evening my husband encouraged me to read The Genius of Swarms in the latest National Geographic Magazine. The article explains what scientists are learning about collective behavior and how that knowledge can be used to solve human problems. It’s a fascinating article for anyone interested in leadership.
For example, Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University, looked at how bees determine a new nest site. Scout bees fly out to potential nest sites, and then return to “tell” (dance) the other bees why their site is better. Soon more bees were at the best nest site than the others. The scout bees returned to tell the rest of the hive and they all moved to the best site.
The bees’ rules for decision-making—seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.
“I’ve applied what I’ve learned from the bees to run faculty meetings,” he says. To avoid going into a meeting with his mind made up, hearing only what he wants to hear, and pressuring people to conform, Seeley asks his group to identify all the possibilities, kick their ideas around for a while, then vote by secret ballot. “It’s exactly what the swarm bees do, which gives a group time to let the best ideas emerge and win. People are usually quite amenable to that.”
There are several other interesting examples and applications to human organizations in the article. Check it out for yourself and/or view the accompanying photos here.
Have you put the Elevate 2008 Conference on your calendar? Well, now it’s time to submit a proposal! The call for presenters just opened up and they are due in November. I’m really excited about this conference, because it’s in Banff, Alberta, my home province, and because the VCAlberta crew are doing some great things! Any excuse to videoconference with or actually travel to Canada!
So, I thought it might be fun to start a “presentation meme”. If you’re not familiar with memes in the blog world, it’s basically bloggers giving each other assignments. Here’s an example from David Warlick. (TWICE folks reading this, sound like a “professional growth opportunity” to you?)
I’m not on the conference planning committee or involved in any way, but I thought it would be interesting to make a list of people & sessions I’d like to see at the Elevate 2008 Conference. This is just a beginning brainstorm. You can continue it by commenting or making a list on your blog!
I’m sure you can think of many more! Comment or blog your ideas! And start planning now so that you can make it to Banff in August 2008. Figure out a way. It’s going to be an amazing experience I’m sure!
Hmmm. Still thinking about yesterday’s post about the lack of VC blog entries from NECC. After reading Brian’s comment, I skimmed through his blog entries from NECC. In describing the Blogger’s Cafe, he said:
Someone brought over their laptop so they could Video-Skype a friend from across the country that is interested in progressive education so she could listen in and Chris was totally accommodating. This is how to conference. The face to face is awesome and needed.
So I hopped over to technorati for a search on Skype & NECC07. 68 posts! With people Skyping in friends who couldn’t make it to NECC to join the conversation, Skype chatting during a session (or not in a session) with others, etc. How cool is that! We need that for the IVC crowd at NECC & away from NECC next year.
Looking at my list of IVC bloggers, I think most of us couldn’t make it to NECC this year. That would account for less blog entries. So would the lack of IVC sessions. Seems like there weren’t as many as last year. Here’s a program search for videoconference, videoconferencing, and IVC. Certainly some neat sessions that I would have loved to read about!
Anyway, from the hitchhikr perspective, it seems that Skype was the videoconferencing news this year and a tool that should be used next year to bring in conversations with our VC friends who can’t make it to NECC. A continuous NECC-Skype-chat-cast on VC next year anyone??!!
Well, I skimmed through and did some searches on the blog posts for NECC07 to get a flavor for the discussion and mood at NECC this year since I couldn’t attend onsite. I was disappointed that the web 2.0 crowd at NECC generated a lot of buzz, however I couldn’t find much blogging about videoconferencing. (Thanks Gail for your post & love how that pix of the hat gets around.) Then I read Roxanne’s post, Now Go Tell Two Friends.
Those of you who work as distance learning coordinators know that there really is no formal training available to teach us how to do our job.
There are technical trainings to learn how to run the equipment and Janine’s online courses that teach about creating projects and 123VC to immerse teachers into the videoconference/distance learning environment, but how do coordinators learn how to coordinate programs and what is available?
One way to learn is by blogging.
Amen, girl! What a blessing the blogging conversation about videoconferencing has been especially this past year for me. I learn so much from my colleagues blogging. We’ve started to really comment and interconnect our blog conversations in the ways that the web 2.0 crowd is doing so well. We can improve on this small start!
We need the same collaborative-learning-growing-knowledge community in the K12 videoconferencing world that exists in the School 2.0 world. We have so much to learn from each other! And some of you are really pushing the edges with creative cool engaging uses of videoconferencing in the classroom. You don’t have to blog every day, just start writing about what’s going well and what you’re experiencing and learning! I want to read your blog!!! Yes, YOU reading this right now. Send me an email when you start so I can link to your blog here.
This morning I’m listening to the SIG IVC Forum at NECC remotely! Thanks to all the organizers who made that happen!! They are sharing 15 presentations fast with each person sharing for exactly two minutes. I’m trying to capture some of the pieces. If anyone reading this has the digital version of the handout that was passed out to everyone onsite, please comment & share where it’s online! I’m sure wishing I had the handout! Due to some technical glitches we missed pieces of some of the presentations.
July 24 Update. Dawn Colavita from CILC so graciously shared with me the handouts. So I’ve updated references below accordingly. Thanks Dawn!
If you know any other details to fill in my holes from taking notes, please let me know!!
This morning I remotely presented a workshop for NECC: Designing Quality Interactive Projects for Videoconferencing (this second link goes to the handouts too). We had a full crowd with 30 participants onsite in Atlanta, and 4 participants onsite here in my distance learning room.
I wanted to model this year’s NECC workshop after the Mini-Jazz workshops I’ve done with Roxanne this past year. So after a short introduction to videoconferencing and what you can do with it, we divided into groups and everyone got on camera and introduced their group. In the process, I was able to provide some extra instruction on how to do posters well! 🙂 One group had wonderfully thick fat writing and their poster was so easy to read.
Then we talked through the latest version of my projects booklet, with stories and video clips along the way. I had emailed the participants ahead of time, and some of them had done Kid2Kid connections, so I had them share their stories sprinkled through as we looked through the booklet. It was neat to have everyone hear from someone other than just me!
After a break, I divided them into groups and had them dream up a project idea, pick a potential month and time, and share their ideas on a poster. Here’s where it gets really crazy! I created a GoogleDocs file with all the participants information so they can network with each other after the workshop. I had invited them ahead of time; and about half of them had gone in and added more details about themselves. In the same file, I had another sheet to collect their ideas. As they presented, I recorded the following:
After each presentation, then I asked “who wants to do this with them?” I wrote down their first names, and since we already have all the contact for everyone in the first sheet, they’ll be able to contact each other and actually do the project. I’m really getting into the whole idea of follow-up and creating structures for people to actually implement their ideas. I was concerned that GoogleDocs would be too much of a stretch and just one more thing. But they jumped right in and some were editing right along with me as I recorded the project ideas. It worked well way beyond what I imagined! Those that couldn’t get in during the workshop will work with me via email to get set up. And I’m hoping (not promising!) to email everyone in the fall with reminders of their idea and who their partners are.
I’m much more pleased about how this year’s workshop went compared to last year, and I think the participants got more of what they were hoping for as well. I look forward to seeing these connections actually happen next year!
