Discussing Little Brother with Cory Doctorow: Take Two

Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's students will once again be discussing Little Brother with author and blogger Cory Doctorow. A different set of students had this opportunity two years ago and it was a great experience (see that post for more details on the bigger picture of the unit), so we're really looking forward to this.

If you're available at 8:30 am Mountain Time on Tuesday, January 31st, feel free to join us in the live stream or the live blog. Mr. Doctorow will be responding to our students' questions live via Skype from London (the stream will be a not-so-great quality webcam-based ustream, but you should at least be able to get an idea what it looks like and hear fairly well), and the live blog is a place for our students to backchannel while the Skype session is occurring. If you do join us in the live blog, we simply ask that you use your real name and make constructive contributions to the conversation.

Update 1-31-12
Here are a few pictures from today and the embedded ustream archive.

Skyping with South Korea

Anne Smith is at it again, this time having her all boys' class Skype with students in South Korea.

My all boys' class was matched up with Jeff's class in South Korea at the Korea International School.  I knew that my all boys' class was going to be writing their "This I Believe" essays on something important to them, something they strongly valued.  Jeff let me know early on that his class was going to be writing their essays with a slight twist to the assignment: "I Believe in Evolution...".   To help you understand his requirements for their essays, Jeff is a science teacher, thus they were going to be writing about evolution.

The time difference between Colorado and South Korea is a bit of an issue, so the students in South Korea agreed to stay up late and Skyped our students from their homes. Read Anne's post for all the details, but this was another great opportunity for our students to connect and learn from/with other students.

Here's a Picasa slide show that Anne put together to give you an idea of what it looked like on our end.

Not Just the Facts, Ma'am

My sixth grade daughter came home with a social studies homework assignment this weekend: Research 10 Facts About Your Country (in her case, the Bermuda Islands).

Now, I want to be clear here, I'm not necessarily saying this is a bad assignment. I don't know where the teacher is going with this. I could see this being the start of a really interesting exploration of countries, we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

We began by doing what the assignment asked. We helped Abby find some appropriate websites about Bermuda and she read through them and tried to pull out some interesting and relevant facts about Bermuda (copying and pasting into a Google Doc). We also pulled up Bermuda on Google Maps to see where it is, and went to Flickr to look at some pictures of Bermuda. We had some decent conversations about what might be considered important about a country, but what might also be interesting to other sixth graders.

Now, at this point, it's an okay if not particularly engaging assignment and, again, I don't know where the teacher/class is going next with this. But, because Abby is our kid (some would say "has the misfortune of being our kid") we asked her if she might like to try to talk to someone in Bermuda and ask them some questions. (We're walking a fine line here, but we're trying to encourage her to be more curious and less anxious about just finishing the assignment.) She said sure, so I tweeted out

Within a couple of minutes Jennifer tweeted back

And then a few minutes later Shannon tweeted

 

Shannon kindly agreed to a Skype conversation the next day and Abby generated a list of about 12 questions to ask. As you can see from the video below, the Skype connection wasn't always great (my guess is bandwidth issues getting to Bermuda, but who knows), but it still worked fairly well.





We learned several things about Bermuda that Abby hadn't found in her initial search for "10 facts", including that they catch rainwater from their roofs for all of their fresh water, that girls like playing "netball," and that each house is only allowed to own one car. She also got to see what the roofs and houses looked like, and what Shannon and his wife (and their house) looked and sounded like. Ultimately Abby combined this new information with what she already had, came up with her 10 facts, and we printed out the Google Doc to staple to the homework worksheet. (Yes, I know, but sometimes it's just easier to print and staple than perhaps cause problems by asking to turn it in electronically. She also made a blog post.)

So, which is Abby more likely to remember, the facts she found from a couple of websites, or the 15 minute conversation with Shannon and his wife? (After we hung up we were talking about collecting the rainwater for all their water needs and Abby said, "Wow, they must get a lot of rain." I'm thinking that has more of an impact than reading their annual rainfall in inches.) Which one gave her a better feel for what it was like to live in Bermuda? Which is more likely to encourage her to be curious about the world around her?

What assignments of your own could perhaps be revisited? How can you help connect your students to the wider world around them?

Neuroscientist and Cheerleader: Our Next Skype Session

PBS has a great series titled The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers. A month or so ago the featured scientist was Mollie Woodworth, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard in neuroscience who also happens to be a cheerleader (for MIT, no less).

When I watched some of the videos and read her blog on the site, I knew she would be another great choice to Skype with my Algebra kids. Not only is she energetic and engaging and can talk about how she uses math in her career, but she also has the opportunity to perhaps break some stereotypes high school students sometimes have about both women and cheerleaders. You can read the background information we provided to my students on the class blog and here are the questions we'll be asking:

1. How do you define “math?” How would you describe what “math” means to a scientist to non-scientists? - Me
   
   
2. Was there a time in your life when you ever thought about quitting cheerleading and just focusing on your studies? Did you ever get really overwhelmed? - Becca
   
   
3. Is it possible that, in the near future, we will find a way to successfully clone any type of cell, even going so far as stopping cellular aging? - Alex
   
   
4. Do people think you’re not as bright as you are because you’re a cheerleader? - Jeremy
   
   
5. As you began moving in the direction of science did you begin to notice ties between what you were studying and math? - Mackenzie
   
   
6. What advice would you give us about succeeding in math? - Grant

Again, if all goes well, I'm hoping to ustream it as well, so you're welcome to tune in on our ustream channel. We'll be skyping from approximately 7:21 - 7:45 am Mountain Time Monday, October 25th.

Update 10-25-10: Here's the archive of our session. Mollie was fantastic.

What Will You Share Today?

Dean says it so well in his K12Online Preconference Keynote. This is worth 25 minutes of your time. Really.

If learning shouldn't be confined to the four walls of your classroom, should teaching? Why would we hoard good teaching and learning?

What did I share today? Well, at 6 am my time I Skyped for about 25 minutes with Sharon Peter's students in Mozambique - they had some questions for me. Then I Skyped for about 5 minutes with some teachers in Florida about Skype - they just got it opened up through their filter.

Then I went to school.

IKEA and Geothermal Energy: Skyping with Ms. Anderson

IKEA is in the process of building a giant store about five miles from my school. This is no ordinary store construction, however, as they are putting in a geothermal energy system to help heat and cool the store. When I saw the article about it, I thought this would be another good opportunity for my students to Skype with someone, so I tracked down the contact info of the engineer from NREL that was mentioned in the article. She kindly agreed and the Skype session will happen this Wednesday.

You can read the background info we provided to my students on the class blog, and here are the questions we'll be asking:

1.  How do you define “math?” How would you describe what “math” is to non-engineers? Me
   
   
2. What is the difference between geothermal energy and other forms of energy? Grant
   
   
3. How does the temperature change from the winter to summer underground, and how effective is the water being pumped to control the temperature of the building, especially due to the bipolar weather of Colorado? Alex
   
   
4. Do you think that this system could one day be in the average American home? Why or why not? Jordan
   
   
5. When you were in school getting all those different degrees, did you know that you would be doing everything you are? Did you ever want to start all over? Becca
   
   
6. Two part question: Out of everything you have done and will do in your life, what would you want a youth to remember out of it all? With all your work with renewable energy/heat pump technology what are you most happy about doing and what are some ideas you have to work on in the future? Jessica

If all goes well, I'm hoping to ustream it as well, so you're welcome to tune in on our ustream channel. We'll be skyping from approximately 9:35 - 10:00 am Mountain Time (PLC day for us, so late start) on Wednesday, September 29th.

Update 9-29-10: Archive of the ustream.

Math on the Rocks: Skyping with Professor Garibaldi

Sometime this summer someone tweeted out this video from Emory University.


It features Professor Skip Garibaldi talking about the mathematics of rock climbing and I immediately tagged it to use when teaching proportion. But then as I thought about it, I thought this might be the perfect guy to be my first Skype connection into my class. I searched and found his email address at Emory, then contacted him with the basic pitch. We traded a few emails and we'll be Skyping on Wednesday, September 1st.

You can read a little bit more about Professor Garibaldi on this post on the class blog, where I gave my students some background information to help them develop some questions for him. The basic structure is that he's going to talk for five to ten minutes about rock climbing, or the lottery, or mathematics, or learning in general, then we'll ask him a few questions. Students submitted questions via a Google Form, and I was going to try to use Google Moderator to have them vote on them, but I had trouble getting it to work the way I wanted it to, so I ended up selecting the questions myself.

1. How do you define “math?” How would you describe what “math” is to non-mathematicians? -Me
2. Does learning about things that interest you, like rock climbing and the lottery help you learn/teach better? -Kara
3. Can you recall an analysis/equation that was particularly frustrating for you to work on and what did you do to work through it. -Gabby
4. If you dropped out of high school as a sophomore, how could you go on and graduate and get a bachelor's degree and a PhD? -Ashley
5. What made you realize the connection between algebra and rock climbing? -Mackenzie
6. If you were playing the lottery with, say, 5-10 tickets, what effect would that have on the risk? -Caleb

We're keeping it to about twenty minutes for several reasons, not the least of which is that he has to teach a class twenty-four minutes after we start. We'll see how it goes, but I'm hopeful the students will find it interesting and meaningful.

Here's part of the email I sent Professor Garibaldi describing what I hoped we get out of this:

I'm hoping to accomplish three main things by inviting folks such as yourself to skype in:

   1. Give them an idea of "when are we ever going to use this?"

   2. Have someone who is passionate about math (and learning) talk about how they use/think about math/learning. (And hopefully get them more excited about math and learning.)

   3. Expose them to professionals from a variety of backgrounds (and geographic areas) to expand their view of the world and what's possible.

If we touch on one or all of these, I'll consider it a success. Depending on a few things, I'm hoping to ustream it out for parents to view as well, so you're welcome to tune in on our ustream channel. We'll be skyping from approximately 9:21 - 9:41 am Mountain Time (PLC day for us, so late start) on Wednesday, September 1st.

Oh, I also have to say that I think this (see the entry for September 1st) is kinda cool.

Transparent Algebra: In-Class Part 2 of TBD (When are we ever going to use this Wednesdays)

Does this sound familiar?

Student: Mr. Fisch?

Me: Yes?

Student: When are we ever going to have to use this?

Math teachers get this question a lot.

A.

Lot.

In the past my answer was typically one of the following:

You’ll need this in [fill in the name of the next math course they have to take].

If you go into a career in math, science or engineering, you’re really going to need this.

It teaches you reasoning and problem solving, and that will help you in whatever you do.

I really don’t know.

Yeah, I don’t like those answers much. The problem is, I often really don’t know, other than a vague sense of particular careers, careers that many of my students may not have an interest in. I’m hoping to do a better job of answering that question this time around, and I have a couple of tools at my disposal that I didn’t have last time.

First up, obviously, is the Internet itself, as well as various communication mediums like my blog and Twitter where I can reach out and ask those kinds of questions. While I certainly intend to do that (or, better yet, have the students do that), this post is more about my second option: Skype.

In my previous incarnation as a math teacher, it was certainly possible to try to find guest speakers that could come in and talk to my classes about how they use math. But it certainly wasn’t convenient (especially since my one class next year starts at 7:21 am), and the speaker had to be local, willing, and available. Often if you tried to bring a speaker in, you had to make it more of a big deal in order to justify the event, especially if it involved getting students out of class in order to have the speaker speak once to a large group.

This time I’d like to make it be not such a big deal, but more of a semi-regular occurrence in my class, just part of what we do. So my plan is to fairly regularly invite folks in via Skype to talk with my students (not saying I wouldn’t take a speaker in person, but remember the 7:21 am start time, as well as having to be local and available). Despite the title of this post, this may not always be on Wednesdays (although I like the alliteration of it), and I’m not sure how often to shoot for. My current thinking is that I want this to be often enough that it’s part of what we do, but not so often that it just becomes routine, so perhaps once every 4-5 weeks (still thinking about that).

I’m going to reach out to folks in a variety of places, including universities, companies and my PLN, and try to get folks from many different fields with multiple interests to Skype into my class for perhaps 20-25 minutes or so (depending on the speaker – if they want more time, then I’d provide that, but I don’t want it to be such a commitment that it discourages folks). I’d provide a little bit of background information ahead of time on the speaker and/or their field of work, and then the students will be responsible for researching a little bit more and generating questions they’d like to ask.

While I’m still thinking this part through, I’m considering having the students submit their questions via Google Moderator (part of our Google Apps installation) and then the class can vote up the questions they think are the best. Then when our guest Skypes in they can spend perhaps 8-10 minutes talking about what they do and their use of/thoughts on mathematics, and then the students would ask their questions.

What do you think? Give the voted-up questions to the speaker ahead of time and have them just address it after their intro? Or have the speaker just answer on the fly as the students ask the questions?

I’d also record the Skype call and post that to our class web page for further review by the students, or for their parents or other students who might be interested. I toyed with the idea of ustreaming it to try to allow parents to watch it live to get them more involved, but am worried that I’m taking on too much all at once (second computer, second webcam - adds complexity and stress).

What do you think? Is it worth the added time and hassle to ustream it out to parents?

So, I’d love feedback on this idea in the comments, but I’d also like your help generating a list of folks to contact. I’d appreciate that if you know someone that might be appropriate and willing to participate, or if you are someone who is appropriate and willing to participate, that you fill out this Google Form (also embedded below) and give me a brief description and some contact information. Please note that the results of this are public (and embedded below the form itself) so that others can use this information as well. If you’re interested, but don’t want the info you give to be public, please email me directly instead. I have no idea if this will generate much response here, but I figured it was worth a shot – thanks in advance if you’re willing to share.

The Form



The Results

Daniel Pink Ustream and CoverItLive Archive

We had a fantastic session with Daniel Pink today. He was even better than he was the first two years (and the first two years he was very good). He seemed more relaxed and really engaged the students in conversation more.

The ustream and CoverItLive archives are embedded below. Unfortunately, the sound on the ustream wasn't great. A lot of static at the beginning, although that gets a little better after about 5 minutes, but still isn't great. But if you're interested in A Whole New Mind, or in the process of skyping with an author, it's still worth your time.

AWNM: Year 3

Once again this year our students in Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's English 9 Honors classes will be reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind and discussing it with each other, with many of you, and with Daniel Pink himself (read about previous years' experiences). Students will be holding in-class fishbowl discussions and live blogging chapters four through nine (Design, Story, Sympathy, Empathy and Meaning).

We again have a bunch of folks from our PLN's that will be live blogging with them, and Daniel Pink will be Skyping with them to discuss Chapter 6: Symphony. (Unfortunately due to our schedules not synching very well this year, we'll only get Mr. Pink once this year instead of twice. The good news is that he'll be discussing Symphony this time which is a chapter that we haven't been able to discuss with him before.)

You're welcome to check out the wiki to see when we'll be live blogging, and then tune in to the ustream of the in-class discussion and/or the CoverItLive live blogging on Anne's class blog (periods 2 and 5 on that schedule) or Maura's class blog (periods 3 and 4 on that schedule). We're looking forward to another great learning experience for - and with - our students.

Conversation with Jason Schellen

In the fall some of our Business students had the opportunity to talk with Jason Shellen about entrepreneurship, starting a business, and the high-tech field. Jason is currently CEO of Thing Labs, makers of the Twitter/Facebook app Brizzly. Previously he was an employee of Pyra Labs and worked on Blogger as it was acquired by Google, and he was the founding product manager of Google Reader.

Jason has graciously agreed to talk with students this semester as well, and he’ll be Skyping in this Thursday for about fifty minutes. If all goes well with the technology, we’ll be ustreaming it as well, so feel free to join us on our ustream channel at approximately 12:15 – 1:10 pm MST (UTC/GMT -7).

Update 2-25-10: Here's the ustream archive.

Cory Doctorow Discussion Ustream Archive

Well, the technology worked fairly well for our Skype discussion with Cory Doctorow today. The audio on Skype wasn't perfect, but we could hear fairly well. And it froze up a couple of times for about 10 seconds, but then started transmitting again. We also lost the ustream once, which is why I've embedded two ustream archives below.

Part 1 (about 17 minutes) is the first part (amazingly enough) of our discussion. We actually start about 3 minutes into the recording, as I hit record before we actually got started just to make sure I didn't forget. Then Part 2 is obviously the remaining portion (about 41 minutes). We probably lost about a minute in between those two recordings. Given the audio issues on Skype, it's a little hard to hear on the ustream as well, but I think you can make most of it out.

Overall, I think it was a great experience for our students. Thanks, Cory, for being so willing to give your time and talents to help our students.

A Good Day

Anne Smith’s English Literature class recently discussed Act III of Hamlet with Debi Ohayon’s AP class. Not that unusual, perhaps, except that Anne’s class is here at Arapahoe in Centennial, Colorado, and Debi’s class is at The Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia.

Anne tweeted out that she was looking for classes that might be interested in interacting with her class around Hamlet, and Laura Deisley – who’s the Director of 21st Century Learning at Lovett (great job title, btw) – responded that she knew a teacher that might be interested. Anne’s students are pretty comfortable using the fishbowl with live blogging method of discussing a book, but we wondered if we could make it work with two inner circles, one in Anne’s classroom and one in Debi’s classroom in Atlanta. As Laura writes:

after some traditional back and forth emailing and a Skype conference call, Anne, Karl, Upper School English Department Chair Debi Ohayon and I settled on a collaboration: two joint classroom Skype and live blog sessions on Hamlet.

So, one inner circle of discussers in Anne’s classroom, and an outer circle of live bloggers. One inner circle of discussers in Debi’s classroom, and an outer circle of live bloggers. One Skype connection so the two classes could see (sort of) and hear (most of the time) each other and have an oral discussion. One CoverItLive blog so that the outer circles could discuss via live blogging. While the technology wasn’t perfect (pretty wide shot with the webcams and at times the audio broke up a little, but the students just asked each other to repeat what they said), it worked pretty well (see Anne's post for pictures from her classroom). As Anne writes:

Debi’s students rose to the challenge that the technology and new discussion method presented, and my students didn’t back down when discussing Hamlet with an advanced placement class. Both sides walked away commenting about how great it was to hear different points of view than from the students in their own class.

And, on Laura’s blog, Debi reflects that:

Boy, am I glad my curiosity or sense of duty or both propelled me forward, as it has been a thrill to watch this pilot project become reality, despite the time commitment, logistical challenges, and alterations of my syllabus. The excitement that both my students and I have felt being pioneers as well as participants in a joint classroom experience across the country has been enormous. As Laura suggested, just the concept of kids in the 21st century talking in different time zones about an early 17th century text is intriguing. It's certainly not just about the fun (though it is really fun); the students agree that the Skype/LiveBlog shared classroom has enriched their learning experience. Meredith captured this sentiment today in class during our feedback session when she said, "We got to branch out beyond our own classroom and discuss similar ideas as well as gain insight about other ideas from students we didn't know." Furthermore, Mark said, "It was not only a blast, but a highly intellectual experience that I will always remember." I know many educators fear technology being pushed for the wrong reasons, but I'm quite convinced this was an example of technology enhancing pedagogical goals.

We’re going to do this again on December 9th (over the entire play) and it will be interesting to see if it goes even better. I expect it will, as we’ll probably position the microphones a little better and certainly the students will have more experience under their belts and should be more comfortable with the format.

I think this was not only a valuable experience in terms of students learning about Hamlet, but also because of the sense of community that it engenders. As Debi said:

I'm pretty certain that the something special was a uniquely communal learning environment. Since I also have a personal invested interest in character education, I would be remiss not to note as a bonus what a delight it was to see teenagers from different parts of the country, representing both public and private schools, using literature to discuss timeless, universal moral issues.

Yeah, it was a good day.

Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor . . . Tonsils

Maura Moritz's daughter just had her tonsils out. Being the good Mom that she is, she's staying home with her until she's feeling better. Being the good teacher that she is, she didn't want her class to lose out on valuable instructional time. They were scheduled to do a fishbowl with live blogging over Fahrenheit 451, so what to do?

Well, it's a fishbowl with live blogging. The first thing she can do is participate in the live blog (period 3, period 4). The second thing she can do is Skype into class so that she can see and hear the in-class fishbowl discussion.





Just one more example of how Skype is becoming more and more valuable in a school setting. Tell me again why Skype is blocked by so many school districts?

Jason Shellen Ustream Archive

For anyone interested, here's the ustream archive of Jason Shellen speaking with our students that I blogged about previously. He starts speaking right about the 5 minute mark. Ustream allowed me to "cut" the video so it should start at that point, but it appears to be inconsistent so you may have to fast forward to the 5 minute mark. (It appears that if you go to ustream and watch it there, it starts at the almost 5 minute mark. If you play it in the blog, it starts at the beginning.) My live tweets are below the ustream.



108. Starting ustream now. Class starts in about 5 minutes. http://bit.ly/13MP8H about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

107. Students are hearing from @shellen started with Pyra labs, bought by Google when they brought in Blogger, then prod manager 4 Google Reader about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

106. He's now at Thing Labs, makers of Brizzly. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck


105. He was an art major in college. Didn't think he would need any business knowledge. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

104. Graduated college in 96, web was just coming on the scene. He took a class called "web publishing" about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

103. He thought it was fantastic as an artist that he could put his work out there on the web and control the way it looked. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

102. http://bit.ly/16U1hw for the live stream about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

101. In 1999 started Blogger - a way to get yourself online easily about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

100. about five of them working together in a basement in San Francisco about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

99. He joined them and worked with them to build relationships with larger companies to try to make a little money with Blogger about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

98. In 2003 we had the opportunity to sell to Google - so we did. We had about a million users at that point. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

97. We could accept venture financing and see what happens, or we could join Google and hope that blogging explodes. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

96. We chose to join Google to raise awareness of blogging. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

95. Once he joined Google they though things were going well, but he wanted to find a better way to read and keep up with blogs about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

94. Built a prototype called Fusion (looked a lot like Facebook does now) with one other guy at Google about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

93. It then developed into a product called Google Reader. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

92. It's one of the best ways to subscribe to content on the web. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

91. Stayed at Google for about 4.5 years. 600 people when he joined, 16000 when he left. He liked working in small teams. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

90. He wanted to get back out there and solve problems with people, so he started Thing Labs in June of 2009 about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

89. In January they launched their first product. It's done okay, but he's not really excited about it. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

88. So now he created something he likes better. Brizzly. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

87. A social web reader. Twitter integration, coming out with Facebook support next week. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

86. Trying to streamline your interaction with Twitter, Facebook, etc. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

85. Also focused on the growing phenomenon. People are talking about current events on the web. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

84. Easier to get your news from real people now, not just CNN, MSNBC about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

83. Live stream at http://bit.ly/16U1hw about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

82. You're okay with hearing things through a status update, doesn't have to be highly polished. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

81. Tries out new things and see what sticks. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

80. None of these tools wouldn't be anything without the people involved with it. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

79. Now kids are going to ask questions. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

78. Q: What actually happens when a large company approached a small company and offers to buy it? What's the process? about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

77. They were approached by a friend of a friend. Sergie Brin approached them through a friend. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

76. He thought they were going to talk about a business deal, not buying them. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

75. .@shellen is speaking to a Business Principles class, so they're asking about how to run a business, startup issues, venture capital about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

74. Hard to value these things. Google wasn't a public company, so hard to value them. We said we think you're worth $1 billion, they came back about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

73. with we think we're worth $3 billion - hard to figure out what things are worth when no public share price. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

72. Q: Kylie asks: How does a product like Brizzly make money when you don't charge for it? about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

71. Difficult to make money from day 1. For any sight that deals with people, it's visually repellent if you ask for money up front. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

70. We do have a long range plan, a way to monetize something other than just visiting the web page. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

69. Try to build users first, then monetize it. Now talking about Twitter in relation to that. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

68. Facebook didn't turn ads on until they had 100 million users. The economics change when you have enough users. Can make large amount . . about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

67. of money from a small amount of ads. Not as intrusive. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

66. Most models are advertising based. Next model is subscription or pay for upgraded services. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

65. With Blogger they had a free offering, but you had to pay for more features (images, spell check) - sounds silly now, but it was new then. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

64. Q: Eric asks: What will Thing Labs work on after Brizzly? about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

63. They just launched Lets Be Trends dot com about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

62. It's an application interface. Brizzly shows lots of the trends on the web. Last night it was football as a trending topic. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

61. Lets Be Trends open up that data, and let Brizzly users explain what's trending on the web. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

60. We might develop Lets Be Trends into something else, but we're asking our users right now to make the data more attractive to other people. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

59. But it's too early to really tell what's going to happen with it. We're working hard, but things change quickly. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

58. Q from Ryan: If you want to setup a website for a group or club, but didn't want to use Blogger, what would you use? about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

57. Talking about weebly.com - met the guy at a ball game. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

56. Turns out Blogger is very bad at creating a group web site. He would suggest checking out weebly - his Mom is very happy with it. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

55. Lots of people are also using Facebook fan pages, but he's not a fan of having Facebook bradning on everything. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

54. Q from Shelby: Did you ever think of a product or service, but never tried to start it? about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

53. Yes, more good ideas than there is time to implement them. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

52. The execution is so important, doing it really well. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

51. When he has an idea, he thinks about how hard it would be to do well. about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

50. Sometimes it's crazy to try to build your idea. So he thinks about the simplest possible thing he can do that people can use, about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

49. and is transformative for people, and that I can do really well. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

48. Save the good ideas, because sometimes they pop up again in unlikely places. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

47. 2nd Question: Do you ever have regrets over not going with an idea? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

46. Not really. He has regrets over poor execution of ideas, or not seeing a different angle on his products. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

45. Q from Richard: How do you account/track for every action that a person can take on Brizzly? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

44. He's now talking about Google Analytics in terms of analzying what's happening on your page/product. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

43. The trouble is there's too much data, so they aggregate all user data to see trends. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

42. Brizzly is a little different - it's javascript. So they are implementing some of their own, also using Kiss metrics (sp?) about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

41. There are always bugs in any software. But he hires the right people in the first place, tries to minimize that. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

40. They use "test driven development" - write some code, test it, make sure it should work, then try it themselves. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

39. Users are then pretty vocal about letting them know. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

38. Started working on Brizzly in May - it was part acquisition so he brought on a good engineer about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

37. Rolled it out to users in the beginning of August. So about 2 months - that was fast, and it wasn't ready for prime time about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

36. It's still in private Beta, but rolling it out to more folks every day. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

35. Q from Matt: How do you name your products? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

34. There's a saying in computer science that naming is one of the hardest things. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

33. He wasn't particularly happy with the Google Reader name (he liked Fusion). about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

32. With Brizzly they came up with two terrible names. A new employee was joining them and he asked about it. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

31. They shared the names and they hated even saying what they had. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

30. Went to Brand Market (sp) dot com - found what was available. Really hard to find something not taken. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

29. Q: How do you advertise your products? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

28. Started by talking to the press. After a a few thousand users, let their users give away Brizzly invites. So relied on their users to say about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

27. they liked the product and invite their friends. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

26. Some call it viral marketing, he prefers organic. Nobody wants a virus, everybody likes organic. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

25. Q from Katie: Did you ever think you'd be where you are when you were a kid? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

24. I thoughts I was going to be a cartoonist, working on my drafting board each day. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

23. Q from Adam: Where did you get your inspiration to create Brizzly from. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

22. Talking about Evan Williams and Biz Stone. They left Google before him, they created Twitter. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

21. When they created Twitter, they invited a close group of friends, including him. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

20. By using that early version of Twitter, he got to thinking about all the ways Twitter could be better. (Facebook too). about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

19. He's always thinking about optimization, how to make thinks a little bit better. It's not revolutionary but evolutionary. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

18. When he thought about how to make Twitter/Facebook better, he thought about trends. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

17. The thing that would make this better is to have your friends with you on websites. That then moved to trends. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

16. Q: How do you find a domain that hasn't been used, then purchase and use it? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

15. There's a huge market - he uses namecheap but there are others about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

14. You enter something in, search for it, see if it's taken. There's also an aftermarket - like Brizzly was already taken, he bought it. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

13. There are also word combiner tools, help you come up with permutations, then you see if it's available. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

12. Q from Alex: How difficult is it to create your applications? about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

11. (Sorry if this is too much - thought some folks might benefit from it) about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

10. Start out with a huge list of what you'd like to do, then figure out what you can actually do. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

09. IF you like sleep, then it was hard. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

08. People bring their ideas to me, because I'm sort of known for this. It's a great position to be in. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

07. Thanks @shellen, that was great. Archive should be on ustream a little bit later. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

06. .@shellen Well, did you think it went as well as when they do it on Oprah? From our end we thought it went great. Thanks again. 41 minutes ago from TweetDeck

05. Archive of the ustream with @shellen is available at http://bit.ly/lIL5N - starts about 5 minutes into the recording. 37 minutes ago from TweetDeck

04. Check that. Ustream now allows you to "cut" your video so I'm able to position it so it starts playing right before he starts speaking. Nice 31 minutes ago from TweetDeck

03. Apologies to everyone if it [the massive number of tweets] was annoying. 30 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Carolyn Orf is one of our Business teachers and her students are learning about entrepreneurship and starting a business. Carolyn was interested in having an entrepreneur speak to her students about their experiences and remembered that she went to college with a guy that had gone on to start a couple of companies. She saw him at a wedding about three years ago but otherwise really hadn’t kept in touch with him. So, how to find him? Facebook of course.

She made contact through Facebook (from home, naturally, because our filter is “protecting” us) and asked if he’d be interested in Skyping in to share his experiences and do a question and answer session with her students. He said yes, so we’ll be Skyping during her 5th period class on October 6th, from 12:14 – 1:12 pm MDT. Her other classes can attend via an in-school field trip (if they don’t have anything pressing going on in their 5th period class), and a couple of other Business teachers will bring their 5th period classes as well. We’ll also be ustreaming it out so parents can watch (everyone is welcome to drop in but, as always, we’ll focus on making sure the technology works for the students, the ustream is a bonus).

Oh yeah, the guy? Jason Shellen. He’s currently CEO of Thing Labs. Previously he was an employee of Pyra Labs and worked on Blogger as it was acquired by Google, and he was the founding product manager of Google Reader.

Once again, it's great to see teachers and students reaching out to others, and others being kind enough to give some time. It's so darn easy that I'm wondering what everyone is waiting for? Who could you bring into your classroom?

H1N1, Skype, and a Possible Tipping Point

Anne Smith has a nice post up about how she has students who are home sick Skyping into class in order to stay connected.

What was really impressive was that the students’ willingness to be connected back into our class when they are at home feeling crummy. They want to participate, they want to stay in touch, they want to continue to learn and aren’t letting the flu get in their way.

I think this is a nice use of Skype, and I'm sure many other teachers are doing similar things. I know other folks have said this, but I wonder if this outbreak turns even more serious with lots of absences or school closures, if that might accelerate how quickly schools start to move more of their instruction online (in some shape or form). Could H1N1 end up being a tipping point?

Not Education as Usual on the Skype Blog

I just wanted to quickly point to this post on the Skype blog about our students interviewing Cory Doctorow via Skype:

The ninth grade students were going through a mock exercise to persuade school board members to add Doctorow's controversial 2008 book, Little Brother, to the reading list . . . So what could be better than to have Doctorow himself speak to the class and explain why ninth graders should be able to able to read his book?

The post also includes some nice quotes from AHS students Ashley and Laura, taken from the story in the School Library Journal. An interview of Anne Smith and me by Howard Wolinsky, Skype's U.S. blogger (via Skype, naturally) is embedded below.

Cory Doctorow Interview: Ustream Archive

Today was the day our students Skyped with Cory Doctorow asking him about his book Little Brother. Overall, it went very well. He spent about forty-eight minutes answering their questions (well, more like forty-one minutes, as the first seven minutes before the official start was small talk as we connected early just to make sure we didn't have any issues). He was very engaged, listened to their questions, and made some passionate arguments.

I've embedded the ustream below. Please note a few things. First, as I indicated above, the first seven minutes are small talk (although interesting as well, I think); the formal question and answer portion starts at about the seven minute mark.

Second, the audio quality starts decreasing about halfway through. Not sure if that was a Skype issue, or bandwidth issues on his end or ours, but you'll have to concentrate more as it goes on to understand his end.

Third, you'll notice there are three students asking the questions. This was actually a group of four students, but the fourth student was in a final exam so couldn't be present for this part. Due to scheduling conflicts, this was the best time we could come up with, so the students asking the questions, as well as about twenty-five other students in the audience, were all there in between their scheduled final exams.

Finally, this was part of an assignment where students are reading books that are sometimes controversial and then making a case for why the book should be approved or not by a school board. This particular group was presenting during the final exam period that was directly after this Skype call with Cory Doctorow. They purposely made their first formal question to him be why he though the book should be read by ninth graders so that, less than forty minutes later, they could pull up the archived ustream and easily play his answer (since it was at the beginning - well, after the small talk) as part of their presentation (which they did). Very. Nice.

The Invention of Air, PLNs, and School Transformation

I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air. It’s the story of Joseph Priestley’s scientific discoveries, religious and political thoughts, and his influence on the founding thinkers of the United States. But it’s also a history of his Personal Learning Network (starting with “The Club of Honest Whigs,” which included Benjamin Franklin and Richard Price), and, combined with Richard Florida’s work, has me thinking again about the optimal conditions for learning at our point in history.

Consider this quote from page 51:

Ideas are situated in another kind of environment as well: the information network. Theoretically, it is possible to imagine good ideas happening in a vacuum . . . But most important ideas enter the pantheon because they circulate. And the flow is two-way: the ideas happen in the first place because they are triggered by other people’s ideas. The whole notion of intellectual circulation or flow is embedded in the word “influence” itself (“to flow into,” influere in the original Latin). Good ideas influence, and are themselves influenced by, other ideas. Different societies at different moments in history have varying patterns of circulation: compare the cloistered, stagnant information pools of the European Dark Ages to the hyperlinked, open-sourced connectivity of the Internet.

This describes nicely how I think about my Personal Learning Network, and how social and professional networking in general can help circulate, discuss, and refine ideas. Ideally, this would also describe schools; places that were not defined as much by prescribed curricula, but by a climate of intellectual curiosity and a culture of ideas, where good ideas influere other good ideas.

He continues on page 52:

The idea of proprietary secrets, of withholding information for personal gain, was unimaginable in that group. . . .But Priestley was a compulsive sharer, and the emphasis on openness and general circulation is as consistent a theme as any in his work. . . No doubt Priestley saw farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants, but he had another crucial asset: he had a reliable postal service that let him share his ideas with giants.

The label “compulsive sharer” describes quite a few of the folks in my PLN, and tools such as blogs, delicious, Twitter, rss feeds and Skype help enable that compulsive sharing. Priestley’s aversion to proprietary secrets also seems to apply to the folks in my PLN, where the ethos is “the more you share, the more you learn” – and the more we all benefit. I think Priestley would also appreciate Creative Commons. But I wonder how many of our schools – and the educational processes we have in place - really encourage compulsive sharing, either in-person or virtually?

Johnson continues on page 53:

The open circulation of ideas was practically the founding credo of the Club of Honest Wigs, and of eighteenth-century coffeehouse culture in general. With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R & D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society.

. . .You can’t underestimate the impact that the Club of Honest Whigs had on Priestley’s subsequent streak, precisely because he was able to plug in to an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated. Not just because there were learned men of science sitting around the table – more formal institutions like the Royal Society supplied comparable gatherings – but also because the coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.

Again, sounds like PLNs, and specifically tools like Twitter – “conversations freely roaming” and a “network of relationships and collaborations.” And I wonder if our current education system might be “languishing amid archaic traditions.”

Later he returns to the idea of compulsive sharing and documenting not only the product, but the process (page 63-64):

Part of this compulsive sharing no doubt comes from the fact that one of Priestley’s great skills as a scientist was his inventiveness with tools. He was a hacker, not a theoretician, and so it made sense to showcase his technical innovations alongside the scientific ideas they generated. But there was a higher purpose that drove Priestley to document his techniques in such meticulous detail: the information network. Priestley’s whole model of progress was built on the premise that ideas had to move, to circulate, for them to turn into better ideas. . . . It was a sensibility he shared with Franklin:

These thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ‘till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.

This resonates for me in relation to my own blogging, where I often think of blogging as “rough draft thinking”, or “thinking in progress,” and where I count on commenters and linkers to help me refine my own thinking. I believe one of the big hurdles for getting folks in my building to blog professionally is their fear of not having a polished piece of writing, or of being not completely correct about something. (These are both things I’ve obviously overcome!) But that seems to fly in the face of how so many of the scientists and philosophers that we revere in this country did their own thinking and sharing and, with the amazing ability we have to share today, it saddens me to see how few of us are really taking advantage of this capability (both professionally and with our students).

Further into the book, on pages 73 and 74, Johnson takes up information networks:

The true shape of an idea forming looks much more like this:
That network shape is one of the reasons why external information networks (the coffeehouse, the Internet) are so crucial to the process of innovation, because those networks so often supply new connections that the solo inventor wouldn’t have stumbled across on his or her own. But the long life span of the hunch suggests another crucial dimension here: it is not just the inventor’s social network that matters, but the specific way in which the inventor networks with his own past selves, his or her ability to keep old ideas and associations alive in the mind.

To me, this describes tagging and the digital archiving (and sharing) of thoughts, so that not only can you learn from others, but you can go back and reflect on and learn from your own “past self.” I believe we miss so much, and our students miss so much, because we view so much of what we do as transitory, and not worth keeping or revisiting. What is it about self-reflection (again, both professionally and with/by our students) that worries us so?

Toward the end of the book, on pages 204-206, Johnson makes the connection again to modern information networks:

More important, though, the values that Priestley brought to his intellectual explorations have never been more essential than they are today. The necessity of open information networks – like ones he cultivated with the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society, and with the popular tone of his scientific publications – has become a defining creed of the Internet age. . . . An idea that flows through society does not grow less useful as it circulates; most of the time, the opposite occurs: the idea improves, as its circulation attracts the “attention of the Ingenious,” as Franklin put it. Jefferson saw the same phenomenon, and interpreted it as yet another part of nature’s rational system: “That ideas should freely spread from one another over the globe,” he wrote in an 1813 letter discussing a patent dispute, “for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

, , , Building a coherent theory of the modern world without a thorough understanding of [the Internet] would have struck Priestley as a scandal of the first order.

This speaks to me so much of our often misguided Internet filter policies, the idea that by restricting the flow of ideas we are somehow protecting our students. And, again, it reinforces the concept of openness, and the sharing of student and teacher work, and that through this sharing, this cross-pollinating of ideas, we progress and improve not only as teachers and students, but as a society (see Mark Pesce’s Capture Everything, Share Everything, Open Everything, Only Connect)

He brings it home at the end of the book on pages 213-215:

The faith in science and progress necessitated one other core value that Priestley shared with Jefferson and Franklin and that is the radical’s belief that progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past. . . . You could no longer put stock in “the education of our ancestors,” as Jefferson derisively called it. Embracing change meant embracing the possibility that everything would have to be reinvented. . . .One thing is clear: to see the world in this way – to disconnect the timeless insights of science and faith from the transitory world of politics; to give up the sublime view of progress; to rely on the old institutions and not conjure up new ones – is to betray the core and connected values that Priestley shared with the American founders . . . How can such a dramatically expanded vista not make us think that the world is still ripe for radical change, for new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life? And how could it not also be cause for hope?

I think this is one of the huge struggles we’re facing as we try not so much to reform education, but to transform it. Schools as we know them are comfortable, and safe. But if “progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past” and we should “no longer put stock in ‘the education of our ancestors,’” then we will have to face the uncomfortable and deal with disruptive innovation.

We are going to have to seize on the current crisis to make transformative change and conjure up new institutions – or least new learning paradigms. One of our core values must be to seize these "new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life," to be compulsive sharers and utilize these tools and our learning networks to transform our schools, our communities and our world.

Will that be difficult? Sure, but it’s necessary and it’s time. And, while perhaps difficult, “how could it not also be cause for hope?”