Feeling inspired after MassCue Conference

I just returned from the first day of the third conference I've attended in Sturbridge within the span of a month. Today's conference was for MassCue (Massachusetts Computer Using Educators.) I've heard from several school librarians that this is a great conference, and I finally got a chance to experience it myself this year. Although I dreaded returning to the conference hotel, where wireless access has been horrendous for each of the three conferences I've attended and has even gone down for the presentations, I was soon very much engaged in the program after sitting in on a session on Global Learning from Alan November, a national consultant in educational technology - http://www.novemberlearning.com/.

I hadn't been planning to blog the conference at all (I'm a little burnt out on conference blogging after NELA), but, after hearing November speak, I had to log in and share a couple of the things he said. I didn't learn about any new technologies - it was the standard Web 2.0 stuff - but I got really excited about his ideas for using them in the classroom and for essentially recreating the learning experience.

He advocated for starting to use Skype (free Internet phone service) with kids at pre-school to grade 1. Since children at this age are too young to read and write on the Web, this is an obvious technology with which to get them started.

Students should start podcasting from grade 1, he said. Middle school students in Falmouth are using podcasts to interact with global warming experts based in Woods Hole. Not only is it a great experience for them to interact with these scientists, but the results of this learning are available in iTunes where the whole world can hear them.

"We've got to teach children the courage of having a global voice," he said.

Learning to manage information by using RSS feeds should be required in schools. He noted that this is routine for students in Singapore, while students in the US are learning to follow bookmarks.

He pointed to a Wikipedia article on Pitot House in New Orleans, which was originally written by a third grade class, is now the third hit in the search results list when Pitot House is Googled, and has since been expanded upon by people from all over the world. "We've got to start teaching in early elementary that their responsibility is adding value to the world," he said. The Pitot House article is just one example of how young children are able to contribute to the world.

He also talked about the phenomena of social bookmarking and tagging by showing us del.icio.us If you go on to del.icio.us and look up the tag apcalc06, you'll see an example of how an AP Calculus class is using del.icio.us. Students who come across a calculus site of interest to them can add it to their del.icio.us bookmarks with this tag so that others from the class can benefit from their discovery. Granted, this is done by the few students who are really interested in calculus, but it is an example where "the knowledge of the few contributes to the many."

And how did November describe tagging? "Dewey's over! The whole world is tagging." Of course, it's really LCSH that's over (and it's not really over but should be hidden from public view where only the expert searchers can find it), but since the room was full of non-librarians, I guess Dewey works.

November's talk was inspiring, and I would love to invite him to the region to do a presentation for our school librarians. He does have a podcast available at itpc://feeds.novemberlearning.com/blc06. He also coordinates a Building Learning Communities Conference in the summer that looks quite interesting.

Books recommended by November:

A whole new mind : moving from the information age to the conceptual age, Daniel Pink.

The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century, Thomas Friedman.

Flow : the psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

By the way, if podcasting, RSS, social bookmarking, tagging or any of the other technologies in this post are unfamiliar to you, I am offering an online course for SEMLS members this winter called Learning 2.o that will cover all of these Web 2.o applications. Unfortunately, we will not cover Skype, but I can talk to you about it if you're interested in getting more information.

I'm off to my second day of MassCue tomorrow and hope to see more speakers that are just as engaging.