Blogging on the Brain

So I think the presentation went pretty well! On Thursday, my fellow graduate fellow (Ashley Palmer) and I gave a presentation on blogging at Baylor’ s EdTech showcase. It ended up being a relatively small group (6 or 8 people) which was nice, as it felt much more informal and conversational. We talked about some of the issues that initially caused us some anxiety (technology, self-conscious writing, etc.) and it was good to realize how far I’ve come in the blogosphere since then.

I’m certainly still lacking in a lot of the technical aspects (I haven’t made any significant changes to my blog since I started it, you know, that whole “if it ain’t broke” thing…), but I feel I’ve moved past the paralyzing fear of judgment that kept me from blogging very frequently when I started. This is a good thing, I think, although it may lead to more grammatical errors, comma splices, and misspelled words for you to slog through. In addition, I have come to find blogging in itself a very rewarding and useful tool for me, which I wrote about a while back.

Anyway, as is usually the case after a presentation, I’m feeling all excited about this again. Maybe I’ll try changing some things up sometime, like *gasp* adding a new widget or something (don’t judge, that’d actually be a decent step for me!). At the very least, it feels good to want to blog. Hopefully that feeling will continue for a while!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the keynote luncheon at Baylor’s Educational Technology Showcase. The keynote speaker was Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. In addition to his impressive background in education, Dr. Johnson is also, apparently, quite a talented photographer and used many of his own photographs as a part of his presentation, which I quite enjoyed.

His talk was entitled “Seven Channels of Change,” and it outlined seven ways that we’ll see computing/technology change in the coming years. Dr. Johnson could be considered an expert in this area, as he – with the NMC – have recently published their 14th edition of the Horizon Report, which outlines emerging technologies in education (and is currently being translated into 10 languages!). As an introduction to his talk, he used two photographs he had taken to illustrate what he wanted to get at.

Both were pictures of water, one of a small waterfall taken in 1/5000th of a second, the other a 5-second time-lapse of the stream that waterfall was a part of. He said that at any given point, the image we have of technology is like the short shutter-speed waterfall – it’s hard to tell what’s happening, what direction things are going it, and what the nature of the water is really like at all. He then said that what you can see over time (as in the long shutter-speed photograph of the stream) is how the water moves, how it gets around obstacles, and where it’s heading. I really enjoyed that analogy, and I think it also served to put us non-tech people at ease by showing us something that we could easily understand.

So here are his seven channels of change:

7. Computing in Three Dimensions: this allows for a level of precision in manufacturing, etc. that would be unattainable using any other method.

6. Games are Reality: He made the point that games have been used for centuries as tools for learning (he used the example of mancala, a very old game that essentially teaches how to count quickly), and we’re just talking about changing the method of delivery

5. Keyboards are for Old People: A very good point – keyboards really aren’t necessary for computing, we’ve just adapted to them because we were already used to the typewriter.  We’re already moving away from it with new interfaces like the iPhone/iPad that’s totally dependent on gestures. (Check out these videos of a new interface called sixthsense – crazy stuff!)

4. Users ARE the Content: This one is becoming more and more evident all the time (consider Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) He also showed us all the options you can use on Google Maps (which I had previously been unaware of – look at the “more” tab in the window) which is entirely user-generated content.

3. Collective Intelligence is the New Knowledge: This is related to #4 above, in that we don’t do things like read critics’ reviews of restaurants anymore, we read reviews of “normal people” that have been there.In addition, a lot of us “hear things first” through social networking sites like facebook or twitter, not the news.

2. The Network is Everywhere: As seen from space, the area of cell-phone (and therefore internet) coverage is actually more encompassing that the electrical grid, which is pretty impressive.

1. The People are the Network: The internet really isn’t about connecting to files or folders or printers anymore as much as it’s about people connecting with other people.

So overall it was a very enlightening and very enjoyable presentation! Today is the second day of the Showcase, and Ashley and I will be giving a presentation on blogging, which I’ll be sure to blog about later!