Friday, November 16, 2007

Live Blogging Educating for a Flattening World with Alan Preis

Educating for a flattening world presentation (I will embed the presentation from my ustream later,but you may go over there and view it now.)

Alan Preis, Atlanta International School

He showed the Did You Know 2 video.
From audience response, many people have still not seen it. (Man version 2 of this video is really high quality!! Wow!

I like that, we are living in exponential times. 1 out of 8 couples married in the US met online.
I like BG - before Google.

Such an important message -- we can't solved problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. I honestly didn't realize that the Flat Classroom was in Karl's new video update! I have to show my students this video!!! Wow! (http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com) Man, that Karl Fisch is brilliant.)

Things have to change.

Thomas Friedman says that the real story of the dot com era was the fiber that was being laid during the dot com era. That is the story that few people understand. We're left with a legacy of the infrastructure of the way the world is working.

*Alan has a backchannel however, twitter is down and I can't backchannel without people to "talk" to. Twitter would have at least 4-5 more people in this great presentation!

This is an excellent overview of the book. Alan is doing a great job. If you want someone to understand the book, this is a good presentation to watch.

The real story of Y2K had to do with the programmers working on this problem and where they were located. The methods set up to allow people in India to do the programming for this problem.

*I keep trying to backchannel, but it is just me talking to myself. I like the idea of a facilitator. We'll see how it goes in my session!

He hates the classic response, "PANIC!" The world is changing whether we want it to or not. It is an opportunity... we must use it as a drive to improve the way that we teach!! (Alan has a great perspective!)

What skills are needed? Collaboration, processing, synthsizing, cross disciplinary thinking, global awareness, consuming and producing information.

"Our students aren't just learning polymonials sitting at a desk... they also need to know how to work with others." Alan Preis, Atlanta International School

1/4th of us in the class are getting more than 100 e-mails a day. Do students know how to process and weed through this sort of innundation of stuff. How do they decide what to do? What do they do?

Synthesizing and cross disciplinary thinking. A special kind of individual to make connections to be able to see things that specialists on their own cannot see. How do we teach that?

Global awareness -- Many students lack a fundamental understanding of the world. He is talking about their tandem learning approach... his daughter is learning tandem with their friends. His daughter was on skype and they practiced their language skills. AT the end the girl in France says "When can we have her over to play?" Didn't realize that her friend was half a world away.

Global mindedness, and important principle. We need to start seeing students as consumers and producers of information. How many have students published on wikipedia? Research shows when students are publishing for a global audience that they approach the task differently.

Students need to be well versed in navigating around things. How can they find things quickly? Be aware of what resources and how to get there.

Credibility -- evaluating credibility. He cannot get the kind of information he needs for things. He's talking about wikipedia.

(From Vicki
If Wikipedia has a footnote, my students use the footnote. If there is no original source in wikipedia that it footnotes then I teach them how to be wary of it.)

These are critical skills and before Wikipedia it was hard to teach it. Wikipedia opens the door to evaluate the sources.

Great example, a guy in the audience says, a great flatteners in his life was when he got a free encyclopedia on a CD-ROM with a pack of cheese. An encyclopedia used to be such a status symbol and people had to scrimp and save just to get it. And now you don't have to even buy the cheese.

Information is almost becoming free. Most of what his students are learning will not be of any relevance in terms of the language. Have a computer to buy for my five year old. It will change over the next five years. He is a fan of teaching concepts not the specifics. We should teach concepts and fundamentals, the strategies of learning technologies.

We must expose students to varied sources of information. As students get older, we want to flip the paradigms of teachers and learners.

He is in the process of building a global language exchange. Building collaboration of languages. He has two classes where his students are posted in French and the students in France are posting on the wiki in English and there is a dialog that is beginning to exchange.

He is talking about when he talked to my students.

People asking how do you set those up. He says that there were 2 pieces -- they had to find a school and they had to build a collaborative environment on wikispaces. (This is similar to what I've found in the 7 steps to flatten your classroom.)

The importance of information filtering and time filtering.

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Join Flat Classroom presentations starting now!

Twitter seems to be down (again.) In its absence, if you're online and would like to attend either of these sessions, join me at my ustream. (All times in EST.)

8:30 am - 9:30 am - Educating in a Flattening World - Alan Preiss
Google Pres - http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddqc6jmd_61dr2p6q

9:45 am - 10:45 am - My Seatmate Lives in China (remix)
Google Pres and links are at my Wiki
I have the google presentation and links to the slideshare slides there. Please join in. I need some backchannel facilitators -- if you'd like to come and answer questions in the backchannel, I'd love it.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Twittero, Twittero wherefore art thou twittero

Just got drug into a skype with 50 of my "closest" friends. Twitter is literally totally down. This is what I penned (pulled a lot from my friend Shakespeare!):

Twittero, Twittero, wherefore art thou twittero? Deny thy server and refuse to crash; or if thou wilt not, be but sworn to never crash again, and I'll no longer blog.

Tis but thy server that is my enemy Thou art thyself, not a selfish crashing fiend. What's a Twittero? It is nor hand nor foot nor arm nor face nor any other part belonging to man. O be some other dependable service! What's in a server? That which we call our favorite service on any other server would smell just as sweet.

So, twittero would, were he not Twittero called, retain that dear perfection which he owes without title, twittero, doff thy server, and for thy server, which is no part of thee, find a new stable platform so that we may flock to thy warmth.

OK, I've got to work on my presentation for tomorrow. I will be ustreaming from 9:45 - 10:45 EST -- My Seatmate Lives in china: the imperative for global collaborative projects.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Some practical recommendations on teens and social networking: based on some good primary research

Terry Freedman has written an important article over at Tech Learning. summarizing some extensive work he has done trying to understand teens and social networks. (Oh, and the Tech learning rSS feed is fixed, subscribe here.)

Here are his conclusions that bear repeating. These conclusions line up with the anecdotal evidence I observe daily in my own classroom:


"These arise from my own survey and other sources.

  1. Teens are not as savvy as they and we might think. They are not able to fully assess risk, and even when they do assess risk they don’t necessarily behave accordingly. Therefore schools should do more than scaremongering or reading the riot act. They should:
  • Provide teenagers with practical strategies to help them avoid giving away private information.
  • Encourage the use of social networking sites in school in order to train students in their proper use.
  • Ensure that students fully understand that it is not easy to delete all traces of oneself from a community, because of comments left on other people’s blogs or profiles.
  • Encourage teachers to join online communities for the purpose of CPD. The school could even have its own Ning community, or similar, for the exchanging of ideas and resources, and for virtual staff meetings. Taking part in an online community would help teachers to understand their students’ experience.
  1. Teenagers use social networking sites and similar Social networking sites in order to do school-related work. Therefore it may be a good idea to encourage popular social networking sites to provide easily accessible resources that students could make use of.
  2. Encourage social networking sites to make deletion of personal data a one-click operation, or as near to that as possible"
Thank you Terry for not only having opinion, but some good primary research. Now, we need to some extensive follow up research with larger more representative samples.

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Meet my students live on Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Tomorrow my students will be presenting at the GAETC conference in Atlanta where they will be working on their Flat Classroom project videos LIVE. If you're there at the conference, stop by.

If you're not there, you can be there anyway, I'm going to ustream so watch my twitter and I'll let you know when we go live!

I'll also be teaching a class on wikis from 9am -12pm EST on Thursday, November 15 and plan to ustream and google present that.

Finally, I will ustream my entire presentation on Friday from 9:30 - 10:30 EST and have a google presentation... it is a redo (I always totally redo my presos) of my presentation last year for the Connectivism Conference called My Seatmate Lives in China: The Imperative for Global Collaborative Projects. (I'm looking for a backchannel moderator or two and will take moderators who aren't "present" if you're interested.)

So, stop by, let me know if you'll be around and I'll watch for you!
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Beth Kanter -- Taking Blogging to Cambodia on Wow2 tonight

I'm so excited about Beth Kanter being on Wow2 tonight! It is going to be a treat. Beth is not only an expert at Web 2.0 nonprofit fundraising on the Internet (we'll talk about that too) but recently returned from a trip to Cambodia to teach 18-24 year olds how to blog in order to give them a voice.

Wow! It is almost like teaching someone how to speak.

Beth is what I call "a crossroads blogger" -- she is a person that knows many people in different "sections" of the blogosphere and I'm so excited about learning from her tonight.

We're on at 9 pm EST at www.edtechtalk.com.

Here is information on Beth:

My Blog: Beth's Blog
My Wiki Portfolio: Beth Kanter
My Blog Posts about the Journey
Notes from the Real World - guest post from Read/Write Web
My Cambodian Bloggers Summit Campaign Page
Instructional Materials for the Conference (prepared by me and others)
My fundraising campaign to send a young Cambodian woman to college!

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Postini Introduces New Email Content Policy Management Features

Email Administrators Can Now Manage Email Compliance Policies Easily with Sophisticated Content Analysis and Policy Administration Tools

SAN CARLOS, Calif. (November 13, 2007) – Postini, a global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions today announced new content policy management capabilities to its Email Security service, including protection for social security and credit card numbers. At no additional cost, Postini customers now gain greater flexibility and control to manage their communications compliance and security policies.

"Companies of all sizes are seeking to reduce email security and compliance risk" said Scott Petry, founder of Postini and director of product management at Google, "They are seeking to encrypt email communications automatically based on message content, prevent sensitive content from leaving the company via email and have visibility into policy violations. Postini’s innovation in content analysis and disposition simplifies the process of managing communications compliance policies for our customers. We are continuing to deliver on the promise of SaaS (software as a service) as the most cost and time effective way for large and small enterprises to manage their communications."

Advanced Content Policy Management
With the new release announced today, Postini customers gain access to three significant advancements:

  • Lexical data analysis for credit card and social security numbers in email including attachments with automatic policy enforcement dispositions options such as encrypt or block.
  • Administrators can create advanced policy rules based on text patterns using regular expression syntax and apply a variety of dispositions including blocking, sending a carbon copy to supervisors, or quarantine.
  • With content-based message analysis and reporting, Postini administrators gain intelligence and insight into content entering and leaving the organization. Postini customers can address policy violations with granular, easy to implement policies and address their company specific or regulatory requirements.

Postini’s content policy management framework is available as a part of the Postini standalone service and also as part of Google Apps™ Premier Edition. Content policy management is expected to be extended in the future to additional communication protocols, including Instant Messaging and HTTP.

In addition, Postini also announced significant new functionality for Email Security and Message Archiving services.

Zero hour Detection Capabilities

New early detection capabilities allow suspicious content to be automatically quarantined and re-inspected with updated virus signatures, providing an added security layer of advanced virus protection. New anti-spam capabilities have also been added to detect and block newer, more sophisticated bot-net based attacks immediately. The new advancements to the Postini architecture enable rapid updates to the Postini spam and virus filters for quicker defense against the newest threats.

Advanced Message Archive Management Tools

With new granular Message archive retention and purge controls email administrators gain more flexibility and control to manage mailbox storage management, discovery, and compliance efforts. A new self-serve option for message archive extractions enables Postini administrators to avoid costly data extraction expenses.

Taken together, these improvements enable Postini customers to have more control and flexibility over policy enforcement, email security defenses, and message archiving management. The new content policy management and email security updates are available to Postini customers at no extra charge. The Postini message archiving enhancements are available for Postini archiving customers.

About Postini

Postini, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, is a global leader in on-demand communications security, compliance, and productivity solutions for email, instant messaging and the web. Postini’s award-winning services are designed to protect customers from viruses, spam, phishing, fraud, and other attacks; encrypt messages to ensure confidentiality and privacy; and archive communications to ensure compliance with regulations and to prepare for e-discovery.

More than 35,000 businesses rely on Postini everyday to protect them from a wide range of threats, ensure reliable communications, reduce compliance and legal risks, and enable the intelligent management and enforcement of policies to protect intellectual property, company reputation, and business relationships. More than 1,700 business partners worldwide add value to Postini solutions. For more information please contact Postini at info@postini.comor visit www.postini.com.

Media Contacts:

Marty Tacktill
Postini
(650) 486-8269
marty@postini.com

Derek Kober
GlobalFluency
(650) 433-4233
dkober@globalfluency.com

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