One resource that I really appreciated was the Denver Story Trek. This website features free audio files related to the history of Denver. There are informational casts but also oral history features and I was able to easily download them to my iPod so I carried them with me as I explored. I got through most of my trek. I couldn’t help but think what a great project this would be for kids to do about their own communities.

My favorite spot had to be the Tattered Cover Bookstore near the end of the 16th Street Mall. The latte was hot and strong and steamy and the sofa was comfortable. I’m looking forward to browsing and reading for at least a little while to escape from the craziness of the conference.

Here’s a mosaic of some of my pictures from the trip:
1. On the 16th Street Mall, 2. Daniels and Fisher Tower, 3. Gold Dome, 4. The Old Prospector, 5. Decorations Along the Street, 6. St. Cajetan’s, 7. The Molly Brown House, 8. 123/365 Along the Street, 9. 120/365 for 2010 The Big Blue Bear, 10. Historic Buildings Along Larimer St., 11. Big Sweep, 12. Capital Hill Books, 13. The View from the State House, 14. Union Station, 15. Tattered Cover, 16. Fence in Ninth Street Park, 17. Ninth Street Park, 18. Yes, I took a picture of a squirrel…, 19. St. Cajetan’s, 20. Golda Meir House, 21. The Molly Brown House, 22. Ninth Street Park, 23. Ninth Street Park, 24. Ninth Street Park, 25. Pioneer Fountain

After reading your blog entries and Web 2.0 papers and listening to your elevator speeches, I was struck by several ideas that seemed to cut across all the conversations we had last week. The three themes are lack of time for learning and implementing technology; inadequate, unequal funding for education; and a disconnect between educational goals and assessment. I think the first two are perennial problems in education while the third is a contemporary issue.

There is never enough time in school and yet every year more stuff gets added and nothing gets taken away. Is it any wonder that teachers seem reluctant to add yet more things to their classrooms? Especially when adding technology can bring additional challenges in terms of classroom management and technical glitches. Whenever I hear someone talking about how China or Japan has yet again “beaten” our kids on some international test, I always take a moment to remind them that teachers in those countries only teach half the day with the other half reserved for planning and professional development. Can you imagine? It would seem like a paradise to US teachers who have just grown used to the idea that they do that kind of work outside of the school day, often for no additional pay. So much about school needs to be rethought but the agrarian calendar under which we now labor is looking more and more outdated when web-based resources offer opportunities for teaching and learning all the time.

Inadequate, unequal funding has always been a problem. Most of you seemed to think that your school district was doing better in this area in terms of commitment to technology funding. But as someone pointed out, supporting technology funding in a time when teachers are losing their jobs gets difficult especially since there seems to be a shared sense that many teachers aren’t using the available technology to its maximum capabilities (or even at all!). In your elevator speeches, several of you questioned how the state can help with this…certainly, Virginia’s online testing initiative has been one way to get hardware into schools that might not otherwise be able to afford it. Virginia has been at the forefront of educational technology planning, something I wrote about in the VSTE Journal several years ago. I analyzed the trends seen in the planning since it began in the 1980s.

Finally, many of you pointed out the disconnect between notions of 21st century skills and our state assessment program. In a comment to one of your papers, I traced the development of content-based assessment to A Nation At Risk, the landmark report that came out in 1982. The report was mostly concerned with what kids didn’t KNOW, and now 30 years later, we have based our system on teaching and testing content. Yet, business and educational leaders are suggesting that process skills are lacking. Yes, students might know facts, but they seem unable to problem solve or think creatively and in a world in which assembly line jobs are getting scarce, being able to think on your feet is essential. Our students are leaving the classroom for a world that is much different in terms of working. Since this is getting long, I’ll end with a video clip…this is from True Stories, David Byrne’s film about a fictional Texas town. About two minutes into the clip, the owner of the town’s big business explains his vision of the future. He ends with a pretty profound comment about the nature of work and play in the future. It makes me think…am I working or playing right now?

There have been some positives over the past five decades…such as a focus on environmental conservation. But it doesn’t always feel like things have gotten much better. I lived just 30 miles from Three Mile Island when it melted down and am now sick over the oil gushing into the Gulf. Earth Day began when I was seven because things had gotten so bad that rivers were on fire and whole communities were being poisoned. Now, we regularly see bald eagles flying over head. But we still haven’t figured out how human beings can live without destroying everything else.

And, then there’s education: A Nation at Risk was written in 1982 and I am watching its influence play out now, nearly 30 years later. That report was all about what students didn’t know and that’s what we are busy trying to test now. There was little concern for what they could do or whether they could think and how schools could foster more critical, creative problem solvers. I wonder how long it will take to see any influence from current reform efforts as the slow educational pendulum continues its eternal swinging?

Technology was not absent from my classroom when I started teaching in 1988. They were very old school: film strips, film reels, an overhead projector and an oft-used record and cassette player. I did have a computer in my room…an early macintosh that was used with a laser printer to desktop publish the school newspaper. It was hidden away in the back room. There was no Internet, just the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, most of which we did not have access to. Yet, we learned together with the materials we had. Much of the technologies supported my presentations as a teacher. But they also provided creative outlets for my students. My students used the analog video camera to make public service advertisements. After cleaning the strips in chlorine, they used pens to draw their own film strips. We listened to music as part of our poetry unit and watched the movie versions of Shakespeare’s work which added an interactive element to what was often a text-only approach to literature. I didn’t really think about it as “technology,” the way we talk about digital technologies today, but was glad to have choices related to how I could present and have students interact with information.

The excitement today, I think, is what students can do with the technology. Creating film strips and analog videos seem like cave writing in comparison to digital videos and interactive web sites. My worry? That all this great technology is still mostly being used to enhance teacher presentations and kids don’t get much chance to do their own creation and interaction. I was glad to see that several of my pre-service teachers this semester adopted Google Maps for their lesson projects and allowed students to do the creation. You could argue that it’s not that innovative since teachers have been doing map work with students forever. But what a step away from the flat views with their colored pencil hatch marks. Add markers, draw lines, zoom in and out, check out the terrain, the possibilities are endless.

I’m a huge fan of Google Maps as a great example of the interactivity that I think is really the innovative part of digital technologies. I used it recently to plan and execute my recent walking tour of Denver. I created the map on my laptop, pulled audio from the Denver Story Trek website, and then moved everything to my phone. (Don’t get me started on my phone…I really am in love with my Droid.)

View Denver in a larger map

It’s been an interesting time to be alive. Technologically, watching the world move from analog to digital must be a similar experience to the generation that went from horse-drawn wagons to automobiles. I’ve seen great cultural shifts as well particularly in terms of individual rights. The landmark civil rights legislation was signed when I was a toddler. And while it didn’t pass, the Equal Rights Amendment was part of the milieu as I came to adulthood in the 70s. I’ve grown up surrounded by conversations about race, gender, and sexual orientation and while we are a long way from answers in any of those areas, we’re moving in a positive direction I think as we learn to think of each other as individuals first and then members of particular groups second. We’re complex beings whose identities are woven from disparate threads.

I’ll close with the weirdest thing about being this age: the President of the United States is my age! And, I graduated from William and Mary with John Stewart. My generation is moving in to the leadership, joining but also changing the establishment while the next generation breathes down our necks.

I’m in love with a phone.

My relationships with cell phones have been somewhat spotty. I started life with a AAA phone in 1998, moved to one of the first Treos, and then settled on a pay-as-you-go phone from Target. It worked for me since all I really used it for was to call my husband from the road to let him know when I would be getting home. Lately, though, I’ve been feeling very outdated. In a meeting earlier this year, I was the only person who wasn’t clearly communicating with the others through text messaging, reduced instead to jotting notes on a colleague’s pad of paper. And, I’m anticipating being on the road more often and don’t want to have to rely on available wireless networks to do a quick email check. Lots of reasons…

So, I took the smart phone plunge. But, I didn’t buy an iPhone even though as a Mac user, I really wanted one. With coverage continuing to be an issue, I went with the Droid. And, after two weeks, I can honestly say that I love it and I’ve hardly made any phone calls at all! I check email, post to Twitter, and take and upload photos to flickr. I’m reading a book, listening to music, and playing Sudoku. In a few minutes, I’m heading to a class and I’m honestly thinking about skipping the laptop altogether and just taking the phone. I’ve gotten pretty good at using the keyboard, both virtual and hardware.

There’s still some things to work out: I couldn’t get the wordpress app to work so I’m posting this entry from my desktop. The phone won’t connect to our home wireless but it’s the fault of our old router, I think.

But every relationship has a few bumpy patches and I’m willing to live with these minor annoyances because I just love this phone!

Turkle’s book is a microcosmic look at experience of the analog to digital transition. I am part of the generation that is living through that transition. Like Turkle’s engineers and architects, I face the fundamental question: As technology replaces so much of what we do “by hand,” what analog practices do we want to keep around? I know that some of my colleagues would probably say none, having developed digital lives for themselves.

But, as I face the transition, I find that there are certain things I like to do with a pencil in my hand and the digital alternative is simply not as satisfying. The main one: my to do list. I use it, in conjunction with a print calendar, to map out my months, weeks, and days. It’s the way I’ve always done it and I have yet to find an online alternative that satisfies me. I begin my day by jotting down what I want to accomplish and still get a thrill when I can draw a line through it at day’s end.

I also prefer using a pencil and paper for brainstorming and drafting. Like Turkle’s folks, I sometimes feel as though word processed text looks too complete and the highlighting and commenting tools do not provide the same level of contact with the text in order to complete detailed editing. Of course, my advisor and I used these tools to pass drafts of my dissertation back and forth but my own work on the draft often include lots of handwritten work from outlines, to diagrams, to chunks of text. My spiral bound notebook is included in the archives of the project because much of the thinking about themes was concocted in its pages. At some point, I tried using a digital graphic organizer but somehow the technology got in the way. I wanted to scribble, to draw wavy arrows, to circle words, to jot pictures, to create messiness, and the software seemed to demand neatness and order. I wasn’t creating for someone else but instead trying to dig into my own thinking and the pencil was more inviting than the mouse as the tool to facilitate that process.

While these activities seem mundane compared to Turkle’s folks who are grappling with the meaning of simulations for their very work, they illustrate in a very practical way the decisions we make each day about our use of technology. I think it’s important to consider these decisions and provide opportunities for kids to understand them as well, lest they become like the younger designers who see no value in the old ways and rely, sometimes too completely, on the simulation.

Here’s an example from the real world, aka my own life: As part of the programming I’m doing, I use a lot of comma delimited files, which allow me to quickly populate tables or create merged documents. Formatting becomes important here in terms of learning to escape certain characters and making sure there are enough commas for blank fields, etc. etc. etc. I also had a “Microsoft moment” when we discovered that the reason the csv file couldn’t be read was because its first field was labeled ID and that causes an error message. Since most databases have an autoincrement field as the first field and that field is often called ID, this seemed a bit problematic. But we have discovered that Numbers, the Mac spreadsheet program, has no such problem so we can manipulate the data there.

But as I’ve worked at various projects lately, I have been thinking about what specific kinds of skills might be useful for students to learn and while they eventually lead to those more generic skills (like problem solving), they are very much situated in a 21st century context.

One skill that I think would be very useful for students to learn is some kind of programming: whether it’s game creation using Scratch or Flash or web-based data work using php/SQL, programming is a wonderful way to be introduced to a worthwhile skill that demands great problem-solving skills. I’ve been working with a variety of programming, lately mostly of the database variety, and I move from finding myself knee deep in frustration when the code breaks go head-in-the-clouds excited when something finally works the way I want it to.

I’ve learned that there are always several different ways to do the same thing and that semi-colons are very important pieces of punctuation. I’ve also learned that there are many very helpful people out there who are willing to offer advice and guidance but I have to know how to ask the right questions and provide the right kinds of information. Finally, I’ve learned that I should go to bed when things are working, because when they’re not, I dream about them and sometimes the answer arrives in those dreams but more often than not, I just have a restless night.

I’m going to introduce my students to some very basic programming by using Scratch. We don’t have a lot of time (the biggest problem with the courses I teach) but we can get our feet wet and maybe a few of them will pursue it or, even better, let their kids give it a try.

And, there’s really the rub: virtual communities have two qualities that make them require special attention: they are virtual and they are usually voluntary. Turn off Tweetdeck and Twitter essentially goes away. Forget to visit iGoogle and the blogging world is somewhat distant. They aren’t calling on the phone or bouncing in my launcher bar.

So, for me, the issue is one of just making time and the commitment to being more active in all these communities. Finding something to write about, posting articles of interest to Twitter, and reading and commenting on the Ning. Maybe over that first cup of coffee in the morning…harken back to reading the paper with breakfast?

And then I wonder, if I struggle to keep up my connections with the virtual world, what’s going to happen to may students when they leave the course? Will they have found enough in this virtual world to continue their work: how many of them will blog? or tweet? or be part of the Ning? What do they need to experience in the next two months that will convince at least some of them to continue to use these tools to teach and learn?

I change the workshop every year based on new ideas. When I first started doing it some 7 or 8 years ago, we talked a lot about technology itself and I spent a good part of the day demonstrating emerging technologies like student response systems and Alphasmarts. Almost no one in those days knew anything about Inspiration and wikis were really just for geeks. But now, those technologies are well known and most schools are deploying all of them to some extent. So we turn our attention to the larger discussions about what kinds of skills students will need to move forward in our ever-changing world.

Many of you have heard my riff on all the 21st century skills…I like to pile them all together and call them leadership skills. And I also like to suggest that Benjamin Franklin had those kinds of skills within his own century (18th century skills, as it were). But those skills seem more pressing now, maybe because in Ben’s day they were reserved for only a few and now it seems like everyone needs them.

As part of the workshop, we do a dotting activity. After all, it’s not real professional development if you don’t put a dot on something. I use Tony Wagner’s Seven Survival Skills and give the participants four dots (green, red, yellow, and blue). They are told to evaluate their own classroom or school in light of how well they are integrating these skills. The green dot is the one they are doing the best. The red dot, the worst. The yellow dot is the one they would work on after solving the red dot. That leaves blue: I used to give it to them as a gift. But now, I ask them to put it on the skill that they aren’t sure can be taught. And that’s usually where the good discussion comes in.

The dots often play out very similarly: most educators feel as though they are doing a good job with communication skills as well as helping students access and analyze information. They are not doing so well with initiative and entrepreneurship. And, the one that gets the blue dots, the one we can’t teach? Creativity and imagination. We had a lively discussion this past Saturday about what teachers can do to pique student creativity or foster their imagination.

And as they talked, I thought about the video clip I had edited earlier that morning. It features John Rinn who runs The Rinn Lab for Research on Large Interngenic Non-coding RNAs, part of Harvard Medical School. He’s a young guy with lots of enthusiasm for his work who likes to snowboard on the side. He is definitely creative and has some good advice for teachers who are trying to foster such in their students. The clip was a perfect ending to our conversation and the fact that I had just uploaded it at 5 AM that morning made me giddy with serendipity.

I haven’t put the clip on YouTube yet but you can view it, as well as other related clips, at the STEM Education Alliance website.