StigmergicWeb

It has been such a busy week that I haven’t had time until now to finally post the audio from the workshop that Donna and I led on Feb. 13. I think it is fair to say that Donna had some reservations about how the workshop went; I tend to think that it went well, and I particularly enjoyed the collaborative process that went into making the presentation. The presentation is in a wiki, and we built the presentation in a fairly organic sort of way, adding and adjusting to the different parts over time. Here are the links:

• How to drink water from a fire hose (audio - part 1 of 2)
• How to drink water from a fire hose (presentation wiki)

As I said, I thought the workshop went well. To be honest, some staff were resistant to any kind of presentation on technology. There are various reasons for this, but I think one reason my colleagues were resistant is that they believe (rightly or wrongly) new ways of doing things means more work. I would agree with this, but instead of focusing on the extra effort that may be required of them, they should perhaps focus on differences they could make by putting in that extra effort. This is what we ask of our students every day so how can we honestly expect less of ourselves?

I should mention that I work with some of the most amazing, caring and talented teachers I have ever known. As a technology lead teacher, I get the chance to be in many other teachers’ classrooms, and I am in awe of the skill and compassion exhibited by my colleagues. Would I tell any of them that I believe their teaching methods to be insufficient? Absolutely not! But I would ask any teacher to give a fair consideration to methods that might enhance their communication with and understanding of their students, which is what I hope our presentation did.

I tend to be a “glass half-full” kind of guy, though, which is why despite some resistance, I spent my time in the presentation focusing on the staff who were receptive to some new ways of doing things. If I had to pick one technology that seemed to catch people’s fancy, it was social bookmarking. We have installed scuttle on a school server, and I’m delighted to note that a few staff are now making use of it. I hope to see some students using it in the near future.

I also tend, like Doug Johnson, to have a different view of how to implement change than I did a few years ago. After spending some time working to make some changes at the division and school level, I take a much longer view on things. I don’t think that very many meaningful changes happen suddenly. I work towards change by making sure that I’m walking the walk as well as talking the talk (and we all know tht more walking is healthier anyway ;^D ). I think that I can be more effective working with individuals than in large workshops or presentations, and I tend to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of workshops for changing people’s behaviour. Workshops and presentations are great for raising awareness and generating interest, but real change happens one person at a time.

Well, not quite yet since there is a PD workshop tomorrow for me, but the presentation/workshop co-presented with Donna entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose is now done. My brain is too tired for a full autopsy right now, but my general impression is positive. Many teachers are ready to start looking at some new (and I think better and easier) online ways of communicating and collaborating with each other and with students. Of course, I had the iRiver on record mode during the presentation and if the audio is reasonable, I’ll have that up as a podcast sometime soon (or maybe I should say sooner or later).

Sometime soon, I need to spend some serious blogging time to write down some stuff about projects I’ve been working on at the school, reactions to other people’s blogs and my almost virtual attendance at the Social Software Salon hosted by Brian, D’Arcy and Alan as a warmup to the Northern Voice conference (and it almost worked except I kept gacking Jason’s computer with my Skype connection - sorry about that, Jason). For now, though, I get to take off the ed-tech guy hat for a while, and spend a bit more time wearing the husband-and-dad hat for a few days of being with the family. It won’t be too much of a rest since the house is in midst of rearrangement in preparation for the newbie we are expecting sometime around the middle of March. Watch this space for details.

On Monday morning, Donna and I are putting on a presentation entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose, a read/write web presentation-demonstration-recreation hoedown (in the tradition of the presentation mashups created by the three amigos), for the teachers and other invited guests at the school. I think the title is a pretty good analogy for how some teachers feel about some of the newer social technologies built on the world wide web. We decided that it wasn’t enough for us to do a standard talk while we click through some slides kind of presentation - we need to eat our own dogfood, as the saying goes. The main body of the presentation notes are on a wiki. I’ve put up a blog post on my school blog for viewing and commenting during the presentation. I’ll be taking some photos and adding them to Flickr during the presentation if the opportunity presents itself. If I can find a moment to record some audio, I might even put up a 3 minute podcast for the presentation. After the main presentation, which will be about 80 minutes, we’re going to give the teachers time to play with some of the tools - blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and RSS aggregation.

You are cordially invited to come play with us. Leave comments on the here, on the wiki or on my school blog. You can add to any of the presentation notes (you must be a registered user on the wiki in order to edit). Send me an e-mail to robwall AT gmail DOT com. If you want to blog some ideas, leave a link to your post on the wiki for the teachers to follow.

Trey Martindale has written down a few pointers, supposedly as reminders for himself, onHow to give a tolerable presentation. These are good pointers for everyone, especially about not reading your slides to people and not putting bullet points on the screen just to remind you what to say. I have a presentation to give on Saturday, and I’ll keep these in mind as I prepare.

I am giving a presentation tomorrow entitled eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined at the LORNET research symposium as part of eLearn 101 at the University of Saskatchewan. My basic idea is inspired by Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined wiki-blog-presentation-jam-session that they put together and presented from NMC 2004. There are a lot of robust and fully featured eLearning systems from a variety of vendors or other sources, but all the components of these eLearning systems are readily and often freely available (as in beer and speech). I gloss over a couple of examples using blogs and wikis that I have been involved with as a teacher.

I’m throwing the presentation online early just to see if anyone wants to comment on it. I’m due to give the presentation just before lunch tomorrow; if you leave any comments before then, I’ll try to work them into the presentation. Or if you are going to be at the presentation, you can judge for yourself if its worth staying, or taking off early for lunch (and if you do, save me a spot) ;^D

I’m also excited because of the tools used to prepare the presentation. I figure if I’m going to be evangelizing open source, I had better walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I used Dave Winer’s recently released (under GPL) OPML Editor to prepare the content as an outline. Luca Mearelli released a brilliant hack that allows the OPML file to be exported as XOXO outline format which, with a little XSL magic, can be used by Eric Meyer’s ubercool s5 presentation system for web browsers (think powerpoint but it runs natively in any modern browser). All these tools are free which means that my PowerPoint dependency is nearly gone!

If you have been grievously stunned by the overuse of geekronyms in the previous paragraph, I do apologize. If not, go get these tools now and start outlining and presenting. And don’t forget to check out my presentation on DIY eLearning systems.

I am just putting the finishing touches on my Writing HTML presentation that I will be using in a workshop this evening with some Canada World Youth volunteers who are in North Battleford for a couple of months. I am using Eric Meyer’s brilliant S5 presentation system. I am impressed not only by its power and portability, but for its utter simplicity; great looking presentation can be prepared using only text editing software!

UPDATE - the workshop seemed to go well, and several students were intrigued by the presentation system. It provides a good motivation for them to learn HTML and CSS, so I promised that I would review it with some of them once we have finished those topics (more workshops on Oct. 20 and Oct. 27). I consider the presentation as a work in progress, and there are a few items I’d like to add to it.