very ROUGH Draft - Do not quote or reproduce until this notice is removed
Feb 20, 2009

Feb 21, 2009 - The slides for this presentation have been cleaned up and improved.  Much information has been added and the dead links have been replaced with good ones.  I think it's pretty sharp now: http://tinyurl.com/aace09vance

Regarding the slide show, the first time I uploaded there occurred a server error (according to the message it was an error at the Slideshare server) and I had to upload the presentation again.  The second time the upload was accepted and after a few minutes Slideshare had converted my ppt file to its own format, retaining the links I had included as Hyperlinks.

However there were glitches in a couple of the slides.  

In slide 31 of 34, the Prime role of conferences: Modeling heuristics for effective learning
(the two hyperlinks in the sidebar are neither legible nor clickable) - These should read:

Click here for:

The slide show of the presentation this comes from
http://www.slideshare.net/vances/lets-start-with-teacher-autonomy-multiliteracies-and-lifelong-learning

An Elluminate recording of essentially the same presentation from the Exeter slides, but given in Abu Dhabi
http://tinyurl.com/468qrp

In slide 33 of 34, the 10 Aspects of Paradigm Shift
(the text on the slide did not convert properly)

I suggest that educators must make at least these ten mind-shifts in order to be able to adapt to change in the 21st century

1. Pedagogy - from didactic TO constructivist
2. Networking - from isolated TO connectivist models; e.g. CoPs and distributed learning networks
3. Sharing - from copyright TO creative commons
4. Literacy – from print dominance TO communication that tends toward multiliteracies
5. Heuristics - from client/server TO peer to peer
6. Formality – from Trepidation, fear of being exposed as not knowing TO F.U.N. = encourage class to explore despite risk of Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense
7. Transfer – from lecture, sit/get TO modeling, demonstration
8. Directionality – from push TO pull e.g. RSS
9. Ownership – from proprietary TO open source
10. Classification – from taxonomy TO folksonomy

Plans for this document

• Next block of time I get I want to make this paper reflect what I said at this session
  
• I will then post that to my blog at http://adVancEducation.blogspot.com 
• I will then post a notice here to that effect and continue working on this paper for another project I'm developing.

After a decade of inroads, SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory
AND practice at F2F and online conferences

Vance Stevens

Prepared for AACE's Spaces of Interaction: An online conversation on improving traditional conferences. This paper was read at 3 a.m. GMT on Feb 20, 2009 (Feb 19 in Manitoba). The presentation was recorded and is available for replay here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

ABSTRACT: The presenter has been a long-time advocate and agitator for broadcasting online both into and out of on-site professional development events and conferences. The presenter describes inroads made during the past decade from 1999 to the present in making conferences accessible to many more than just their physically present delegates. Having debunked the myth that if conferences were open to online access on-site attendance would drop off, a case is made for the opposite scenario: that broadening channels for conversation at conference venues is a win-win situation in which everyone benefits, and conferences where these channels are blocked are the dinosaurs doomed to extinction.

Multiliteracies

A thesis for my talk occurred to me on my way to work, my daytime job. I was thinking of the video we’ve all seen on YouTube, HelpDesk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pyjRj3UMRM . A man in medieval robes can’t figure out how to work the new technology, so someone comes in and shows him how to turn the pages of this new ‘book’. Once he’s got it, helpdesk is about to go, but then the man says, wait, now I’m on the wrong page, how do I go back? Helpdesk shows him the pages can be turned in BOTH directions. Aha moment!

Since the middle ages there has been a literacy out there rooted in print literacy that is steeped in legitimacy and refereed for legitimacy. Largely written by PhDs, published in hard copy, and stringently researched, it's competitive, controlled (i.e. driven top down), and for the most part well worth reading. Print literacy is a major source of our knowledge, and it underpins most of what we do in our practice. Much of it is stored in libraries and available in bookstores, or online via Amazon and Kindle.

But is it truly accessible?

For many of us, not really.  In this day of information overload and twitch speed, we lack the time at leisure to sit and focus on print media as we once did. Blog posts, 140 character microblog posts, and RSS feed abstracts are about as far as many of us get on a regular basis except where we stop to savor the occasional longer post or reference to an article or report, like for example the Horizon report, which has been circulating around the blog and Twittersphere lately: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/ .  Reading has for many of us become less sustained and focused in favor of more serendipitous bursts.  This behavior was presaged by Scollon and Scollon in the late 70's and early '80s when they suggested that interactions mediated by computer tended to be patterned not as a conduit but more like a berry bush (Scollon, Suzanne & Ron Scollon. 1982. RUN TRILOGY: Can Tommy Read? Paper presented at the symposium Children's response to a literate environment: literacy before schooling, University of Victoria, October 9, 1982).  When that was written, the dominant metaphor in education and training was the conduit.  Even then computers were changing the way people sought knowledge to behaviors more characteristic of taking berries from a berry bush.

• Dave Cormier asked something very telling on one of his shows recently. To paraphrase "Has any one of you read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat? I mean from cover-to-cover all the way through?" No one in that particular Skype call had. We’ve all read enough of Friedman's book to get the gyst. Most of us reached the point where he seems to be repeating himself, we got the message, we blogged about it, it comes up a lot in CONVERSATION, but judging from that particular podcast audience, it may be rare for anyone to have actually READ the book all the way through. I took a poll on this issue during my AACE talk and got similar results, perhaps 75% or more had either not read the book or not completed it. And these were all people you would expect had (including me ;-).
  
• There was a show on On the Media last year about War and Peace. The question explored on the program was, has anyone (alive) really read it? This is interesting to me, because I DID read that book, all the way through, at a time in my life when I was into Russian authors. It was a time in life when I had more time, when I used to go to the beach a lot and take books there to read. Life back then was not one steady stream of email, or RSS feeds (however you get your connectivity buzz). Back then you could write a book chapter, send it off, relax, and not think about it till you got a reply about it a month or more later. The speed with which people are able to respond and feedback to one another these days has made the world a more hectic place, and left us little time for leisurely reading.
  

There are meanwhile other media emerging which ARE more accessible to people who lack time but not curiosity.  These media are all around us in the form of podcasts, YouTube videos, Facebook, TED Talks, and so on.  Are these accessible?  The answer is yes IF you are able to retool your notion of what it is to be literate, and then get online and acquire the skills for navigating the new landscape.  If you are able to parlay those skills into effective communication strategies, then you will be multiliterate.

Multiliteracies suggests connectivity, and connectivity is the potential which makes it sensible to raise the issue addressed in this AACE conference, how can face-to-face conferences be made more accessible?  Face to face conferences are a by-product of the print literacy era. Are they accessible?  Surely, not by as many people as would be able to access them online. 

That's where we seem to have diverged into at least two camps on the topic.  There are traditionalists who either do not understand how connectivity would work to enhance a f2f conference, or who at another extreme feel threatened by the thought of insidious intrusions on a space where the elite gather to hobnob. In the other camp are those who feel at ease with their network and who wish to inform the network of what is going on at the conference, and who feel they will benefit at the conference from input from that network to help put things in perspective.  I   It could even be that many networkers are at the conference and simply wish to interact with one another, or with the presenters at the conference, when the presenters are staying in touch with their respective networks. 

Many factors mitigate for and against such greater connectivity at F2F conferences. At an IATEFL conference I attended recently in Exeter, I gave a talk with full intent to stream it to the world and share to the extent the available connectivity would allow.  The conference was at a university, yet I discovered that where I was to present there was no network of any kind in place, either wired or wireless.  I would therefore not be streaming after all, but I decided to record my presentation.  Any thought of recording presentations of others were dashed when the first speaker requested that I not record hers, as she might say anything, and she would feel constrained in the presence of a microphone.  Of course I kept the mic off during her talk, but was equally surprised when the next speaker, at the end of his talk, in full view of the audience, browsed the hard drive, found his slide presentation file, and deleted it.  I'm sure I've left my own presentations on many conference computers, thinking others might benefit, and these days I upload them to http://slideshare.net, as do many others.  So I'm suprised when it's apparent to me that colleagues do not have the same sense of sharing and connecting with others, but regard their work as proprietary, to be guarded and revealed only in curcumstances that harken back to the last century.

People who are protecting their work are not likely to be podcasting.  But this is why I mentioned my commute to work in the first paragraph. Was I reading? Depends on how you commute; in my case I was driving - 40 minutes each way, an hour and a half in my day. Not much on the radio, sometimes BBC but at other times pop music, so I listen to podcasts. After work if I go home and run, that’s another hour I can spend engaged in activities I would be doing anyway AND absorbing this alternate literacy. Is it possible to be at the top of your game if in your daily routine you spend less and less time with hard copy text? This is one solution to remaining up-to-date and literate for people who have limited time to read.

That century was a time of rigor and was fixed in a mindset that mitigated to retain that rigor. This produced a panoply of literary heros, popular writers and scholars with the intellectual and interpersonal skills (you had to sidle up to publishers) to get published.  The long tail had no voice, was left out of the conversation. What’s happening now, the Long Tail is Fighting Back.

Edupunk

Edupunk involves the notion of overcoming obstacles by just plowing through them. On the day of my aha moment, I was listening to It’s Elementary #28 http://edtechtalk.com/node/3495 on the EdTechTalk channel of http://worldbridges.net , where resides a community of homegrown webcasters. Chris Lehman, principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, was relating how he came to put on the EduCon 2.1 unconference http://educon21.wikispaces.com/ . He was at another conference where someone had said they were thinking of organizing such an event and Will Richardson happened to be there and said to Chris that he should do that in Philadelphia using the resources of his progressive school.  Chris said yeah, sure, and probably sent out a few seed emails.  A month later there didn't seem to be much interest, it was dawning on him how much work it would be and was it really a viable project, and he was thinking of canceling the idea.  Then he heard from Jon Pederson in Japan who wrote to tell him he'd just bought his plane ticket.  And so he took heart and went through with it, and that's how these things just ... happen.

This turns out to be one F2F conference with a strong commitment to interacting and back-channeling with a wider online audience, and to hear the feedback from that audience via their blogs and conversations online in webcasts and podcasts, it was highly satisfying and effective.  There are others like which I have never attended face to face, but which I have attended virtually. One of these is NECC.  Two years ago this conference took place at about the time Twitter was just becoming popular, and a large contingent of microbloggers apparently approached nirvana with their backchanneling during the event 

Also on the program on It's Elementary #28 were Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, organizers of The Flat Classroom Project which had Thomas Friedman taking questions from students in Qatar.  This event was featured because it was happening on the same day as EduCon 2.1 (coincidence regretted, but Thomas Friedman's availability was of prime consideration). Here was another conference started spontaneously, by people just doing it, Edupunk-style, and hooking their students, in Qatar of all places, up with the author of The World is Flat, as well as a host of other online participants, students from schools on the other side of the world.

EduCon 2.1 was a well-attended face to face event, not free but if you browse its web site, actually a wiki, you can see that it produced a wealth of materials including recordings of all sessions that are freely available online (sadly, many session recordings were 'lost' this time around).  These materials now reside online and are available for download and listening.  Similar repositories have accrued from two K-12 online conferences by now http://k12onlineconference.org/.  Again, these have resulted in a wealth of audio and video resources which can be downloaded on subscription to RSS feeds.  There have been two WiAOC conferences now http://wiaoc.org, both of which can essentially be revisited through the recordings which remain online from 2005 and 2007 (and the next one is in May 2009, being organized as we speak). George Siemens has organized some excellent conferences, I've subscribed to the podcasts, and I believe I've listened to almost every talk in every one. These last conferences had no face to face components, but f2f conferences should take note, it's GOOD to leave a record, an online and freely accessible one (available for download through RSS feed subscription).  This kind of repository not only benefits the field by developing resource libraries in something other than print, but it follows a model of how teachers should be interacting with learners, or better, how we should be learning from one another.

(Jon wrote one of the first handbooks for teachers on Using Del.icio.us in Education: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s; Will Richardson has pioneered pedagogical uses of blogging and managing class work through RSS feeds).

RSS and aggregators; excellent resources from Will Richardson ...

• Presentation: Recording: "RSS: The New Killer App for Educators". Description page: http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=679449; direct link: https://www.elluminate.com/site/pmtg.jnlp?psid=d429011575.202706
• RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators, http://www.weblogg-ed.com/rss_for_ed

Noam Chomsky was on last night as a guest of Lancelot Schools.  Teachers in Heike Philp's network were invited to attend and talk to Noam, or pose questions in advance. Noam has had a blog for a long time and his web page http://www.chomsky.info/audionvideo.htm shows over 200 videos.  Chomsky is a character steeped in print literacy who has been able to step with agility into other media.  He hardly ever appears on American mainstream media but I hear him speak frequently on podcasts I downoad from "Democracy Now" http://democracynow.org.

Structuring educational environments like SL. Set up a display, it gets full of people who interact. It has its moment. Everyone leaves. The display is still there. Go back later, you’re alone, but you can explore, absorb. Go back with a friend …

Let's go back to the dark ages ... well they weren't completely dark, I had been working with students and other teachers online since we started Webheads in 1997 and by 1999 we had a community formed around an online class we called Writing for Webheads.  I was regularly attending TESOL conferences back then and though people were talking enthusiastically there ABOUT using the Internet, they were hardly able to demonstrate what they were doing because it was so difficult and expensive to get a phone line into a presentation room to go online with AOL or something.  There was one way that you could get a connection back then, and that was by becoming a part of an Internet Faire. TESOL arranged at its expense for the Electronic Village to have Internet access and if you managed to get a presentation accepted here you could use it for your presentation.  So in 1999 I convinced our group of students and teachers who had been meeting online at noon GMT each Sunday that it would be fun to meet in the same place during the hour I would be demonstrating what we did there at the TESOL conference.

Now the interesting thing about this is that we were at that time just learning about online communities.  The fact that people could meet others online that they didn't even KNOW and accomplish something like help each other learn - students wanted to learn English, teachers wanted to know what worked in the online environment.  The issue of pictures .. when I asked at first if people would send them to me, they were quite hesitant.  Eventually someone did and I put it on our website.  Someone else sent one and I had two.  Then a couple more, and soonmany were willing to send a pic and we had a gallery.  We met regularly but now we knew a little more about each other, we had faces.

But this was still an anonymous environment.  Would people here keep commitments?  If I wrote my peers and proposed they give me a cherished slot at an Internet faire which was in one of the only rooms at this conference hotel in New York where you could go online, would these people I didn't actually know show up?  Or would I be sitting there looking stupid and making excuses.  We didn't know back then.  This was ten years ago.  We were surprisedback then when things happened on cue over the Internet.  But my friends showed up and chatted with me at the Palace, and conference-goers stopped by and looked interested. Maggi and Michael both appeared at the Palace and chatted with passers- by. Student reactions:
    * Vance: I am really happy for you! It's glad to know that you can present what we have done in the web. I really appreciate what you have done for us! - Hilda
    * I am so happy to have you my teacher and my web page to be used at the TESOL conference. Best luck for your speech at conference. See you around. Choi Hae-Young. Mar03, 1999

The following year 2000 we made further inroads into F2F conferences.  At these events we used a voice chat client called HearMe which was starting to revolutionize how we were interacting with each other.  We had shared pictures, now we had voice.  We were also starting to attract the attention of other teaching professionals because we were able to put out msgs on professional lists like TESLCA-L and Neteach that we invited other teachers to join us live online.  Eventually we could invite them to events like the two here:

Presentation on Writing for Webheads at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, March 2000 – WFW was the subject of a demonstration held live and online in Abu Dhabi. After cameo appearances at web fairs mentioned above, this was the first time the Webheads appeared at a conference presentation live and online as a session in their own right. Michael appeared at the Palace and in the voice chat along with Ming. 

The annual TESOL Conference in Vancouver, March 2000 - the annual TESOL conference is hard to break into for connecting with the outside world because it's almost impossible to get an internet connection UNLESS you are a part of a TESOL organized event.  At this conference Webheads got a big break, and we made a giant stride in helping TESOL branch out to the wider community.  I was invited to give an invited presenters presentation on the community building aspects of the Writing for Webheads class, and there was an Internet connection available so I USED it to give a live and online demonstration of students and mentors interacting online. Teachers Michael and Maggi and Chinese students Ying Lan, and Moral performed online before an audience of around 100. The handouts and reports can be found at http://lightning.prohosting.com/~vstevens/papers/te sol2000/T2000online_files/frame.htm (start at Slide 5)

 

More history here: http://aace2009vance.pbwiki.com

The above document points to all the online conferences I’ve been involved in since I first started going online with language students and teaching peers over a dozen years ago.