Discussing Little Brother with Cory Doctorow

Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's ninth graders are currently finishing up reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Previously they read 1984 and their task is to look at both books and answer the questions:

What have we learned - or what have we not learned - over the past 60 years [from Orwell's time to the present]? What does our future hold for us?

This has been a fascinating unit to observe. Anne and Maura have brought in additional folks to speak to different aspects of each novel. They brought in our Western Civilization teachers to help our students understand what was going on in the 1930's - 1950's that Orwell was reacting to and that influenced 1984.

As they moved on to Little Brother, they invited in different social studies teachers to talk to the students about 9/11 and The Patriot Act. They also invited in myself, Mike Porter (our district's Assistant Director of Instructional Technology), and Ben Horblit (a knowledgeable former student of Anne's who's now a senior) to talk about the technology in Little Brother and its ramifications. Then earlier this week Mike Porter, along with Dan Maas (our district CIO) visited to talk about rights and responsibilities surrounding technology use and school law, which was a very interesting discussion.

Now as they are finishing up Little Brother, the students will have the opportunity to question the author, Cory Doctorow, himself. As you may recall, I blogged last spring that some students who had chosen to read Little Brother on their own contacted him with questions, and that they then ended up with an hour long Skype conversation with Cory. He agreed to Skype again this year, this time with students from all four sections gathered together in our Forum to ask questions and listen.

Cory will be joining us for about an hour again via Skype and, if all the tech goes as planned, you are welcome to watch via ustream. We will be broadcasting from approximately 8:25 - 9:25 am MST (UTC/GMT -7) on Tuesday, February 2nd. Some of the students will also live blog over on Anne's class blog. As always, our focus will be on making the learning happen for our students, so if we have any technical difficulties, the ustream will not be our first priority.

The Best (?) of The Fischbowl 2009

As I have the previous three years (2008, 2007, 2006), this is the post where I try to pull together some of the most interesting blog posts from my blog in 2009. These are not necessarily fantastic posts, but should give readers that are new to the blog a place to start to get a feel for what this blog is all about.

I posted 88 times in 2009, down sharply from 141 in 2008, 148 in 2007 and 199 in 2006. This is my 624th post since beginning in September of 2005.

Here we go.

January (10 posts)
Best: Take Me to Your Leaders(s)
Honorable Mention: I Just Want to Say One Word to You: Collaboration

February (9 posts)
Best: The Great Reset: A Crisis (in K-12 Education) is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Honorable Mentions: What's the Purpose of School?; AWNM Video Conference: Tech Setup, Ustream Archive and Pictures

March (5 posts)
Best: The Invention of Air, PLNs and School Transformation
Honorable Mention: Disconnect(Ed)

April (8 posts)
Best: Great Expectations
Honorable Mentions: What's in a Name; Pondering

May (5 posts)
Best: Why Should Your District Continue?
Honorable Mention: Cory Doctorow Interview: Ustream Archive

June (3 posts)
Best: Student Display Names: I Was Wrong
Honorable Mention: We Can Do This. We Should Do It.

July (2 posts)
Best: It's Who You Know
Honorable Mention: A Digital Footprint Growth Model

August (4 posts)
Best: More Than a Passing Trend
Honorable Mention: Linux on Netbooks and Whiskers on Kittens

September (8 posts)
Best: A Low Fidelity Education?
Honorable Mention: We Have the Technology

October (12 posts)
Best: Is the Pen Mightier than the Keyboard?
Honorable Mentions: What's Core?; Jason Shellen Ustream Archive

November (12 posts)
Best: Twitter Lists and Aggregated Content: Are We Responsible?
Honorable Mention: A Good Day

December (10 posts)
Best: Google Goggles: Why Didn't I Think of That?
Honorable Mention: Which Campaign is More Effective?

2010 AHS Faculty Dance Video

As I've said several times before, we take a break from the regularly scheduled content of this blog to bring you the 2010 AHS Faculty Dance (performed at our Winter Pep Assembly).

It might not show up in AYP, or help us get Race to the Top dollars, but I think this is still a huge part of what a learning community should look like.

Learning 2.0: You Are Going, Aren't You?

Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation (2010 Edition) is fast approaching on February 20th - have you signed up yet?

Let's review:

• Registration costs . . . $0
• Lunch costs . . . $0
• Sessions cost . . . $0
• Learning opportunity . . . priceless.

We're about to hit the 100 mark in terms of registrants, well on our way to the 140 to 160 we've had the previous two years, and the session descriptions are now posted. You can attend physically or virtually, as we'll be streaming the sessions. While most folks will be from Colorado, you're all invited, and we have folks coming from Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Indiana (that I know about).

So, if you haven't already, go ahead and register, check out the FAQ, sign up to volunteer, or join (or lead) a round table session. Because this doesn't happen without you.

Note: When I say "we," I really mean primarily Scott Elias and Deanna Dykstra, who are organizing this year.

Snow Kidding

Just a quick post to point out two articles in today's Denver Post. The first article is about how Colorado Ski Resorts are leveraging technology to get the word out about ski conditions.

"The snow message is absolutely as important as it has ever been for us," said Vail Mountain's senior vice president and chief operating officer, Chris Jarnot.

What has changed is that everyone with a mobile phone can be a snow reporter — and everyone with a mobile phone or computer can be the instant recipient of the latest snow news.

Not even a year ago, resorts' hopes hinged on snow during televised Broncos games. Resorts issued snowfall totals a day after the snow fell. They bought powdery ads in magazines six months before the season began.

The idea was that resort reservation desks were inundated with calls when football stadiums were frosted white, and last year's photos of untrammeled snow were good enough.

But by 5 a.m. this frosty Christmas week morning, the news of new snow was posted on websites for Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone, the four resorts that host more than a third of Colorado's roughly 12 million annual skier visits. It was waiting in the inboxes of thousands of skiers. Newspapers, radio and TV stations had it ready for morning reports.

Copper Mountain and Sunlight have eliminated the middlemen like Semrow — allowing Web surfers to check the snow themselves via webcam.

"Now we see that blip (of vacation interest and bookings) as soon as the first flake flies," Jarnot said.

And here's the quantification of that shift:

Vail Resorts held back about 80 percent of its multimillion-dollar winter marketing campaign by skipping the traditional one-page ads in national magazines like Outside, Men's Health and Conde Nast Traveler. Instead, the company joined the social-networking revolution and now e-pitches its powder.

The company took the money it would have spent on those pricey magazine ads and kept it for up-to-date campaigns issued through e-mail, newspapers, search-engine display ads and online banners.

It's a plan that works with skiers' changing habits: Where they once booked holidays months in advance, today they are increasingly apt to book the week before.

80 percent. Wow.

The second article was a brief report on the accuracy of ski resort snow total reports. The interesting thing here was not that resorts in New England (the study didn't look at Colorado) tend to inflate their snow totals slightly, it was this:

Ironically, during the study period, a new iPhone application emerged that allows users to report their own snow observations at various resorts.

Suddenly, according to Zinman and Zitzewitz, "exaggeration falls sharply, especially at resorts where iPhones can get reception."

So, perhaps nothing profound here, but another indication of two of the shifts that I think we're seeing.

First, a shift away from traditional marketing and broadcast advertising to more targeted, passion-based, direct-to-those-who-are-interested-when-they-are-interested campaigns, with the resultant elimination of various middlemen (including traditional media). It's also a "just in time" information delivery service, which allows people to much more easily adapt their plans at the last minute ("they are increasingly apt to book the week before"), which I think is an interesting emerging meme that we'll see a lot of discussion about in the next few years.

Second, the continuing rise of user-generated content, in this case real-time snow reports, that - at least in a small way - continues to democratize access to information and transfer some of the power from businesses to customers ( and governments to citizens; and producers to consumer/producers). As transparency increases, behaviors change, which is also another interesting meme I think we'll be talking about.

So, this post is mostly just to point you to those two interesting tidbits, but I do wonder about the potential impact to educational institutions. Passion-based, just-in-time delivery of information and the importance of transparency and users generating relevant and meaningful information for each other - I wonder what we can learn from that?