No point in re-creating the wheel, so I’ve copied the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues below (he only difference is that I embedded my teaser video into this post instead of just providing a link):

***

Dearest colleagues,
If I told you that there is an extraordinary educational conference that you can attend at no expense to your travel budget, (or to any other budget, for that matter) and that you could attend largely at your own convenience, you’d listen, right?

Well, beginning on October 13 and continuing through the end of the month, the K12 Online Conference 2008 will be taking place…well…everywhere and anywhere.  As it is written on the homepage of the conference:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

To learn more about the conference, I would suggest reading and clicking through this site. Basically, though, presentations are made via prerecorded videos and broadcast at specific times.  There are also opportunities to “meet” and “talk to” the presenters at a webinar called a Fireside Chat.

The schedule of events can be found here.  You will notice that yours truly is one of the select presenters and my presentation airs on Tuesday, October 21 at 12:00 p.m GMT (which, if I’m correct, is 8:00 EST). You can view a “teaser” of my presentation [below], and teasers for many of the other presentations are being added to the conference blog every day.

I can’t recommend this conference enough, and please pass along this information to your students.  This is a FREE conference FOR educators BY educators.  It is a 21st Century conference about 21st Century teaching and learning.

Thanks for considering this extraordinary learning opportunity and I hope to “see” you at the fireside chats!

Yours,
JB

Tags: conference, education, k12online08, technology integration

At the end of his article about an innovative offensive scheme called the A-11 being implemented by one high school football team in California, ESPN.com’s Michael Weinreb writes: “And while I do not know if the A-11 can challenge all our assumptions, or if it is merely a lark, I do know that it accomplishes one very important thing: It reminds us that nothing in the universe can ever remain static. Not even football.”

So, clearly, Weinreb has never considered the institution of public schooling.

That oversight notwithstanding…

Just before I launched this blog, I wrote over on LeaderTalk about an ESPN article by Gregg Easterbrook where he explored a different innovative football strategy: no punting or rarely punting.  Easterbrook pointed to research and simulations that rather clearly demonstrated the benefits of a no-punt or rarely punt approach.  Yet, he could only find one high school team that was willing to adopt the strategy.  Why the reluctance in the face of compelling evidence/data?  As I wrote in the earlier post, Easterbrook offers two reasons: “First, ‘because that’s what we always do.’ Second, because if coaches order fourth-down tries that fail, they will be blamed, whereas if coaches order punts, the players will be blamed for the loss.“  More succinctly, coaches are risk and blame averse.

Now, we have Weinreb’s report on the A-11, a radical offensive strategy in football.  Weinreb wonders about the viability of the A-11, but does not directly speculate on why coaches will or will not adopt it.  Rather, more philosophically, he writes: “The dominant paradigm has always tended toward conservatism; in the previous century, it took several decades for the forward pass to gain acceptance. Change is frowned upon, even as it is surreptitiously embraced by coaches, who will plagiarize almost any scheme that might potentially save their jobs.”

Conservatism as the dominant paradigm…change is frowned upon…save their jobs.  Sound familiar educationalists?

If you want to see what the A-11 looks like in action, check out the following video:

Tags: education, football, innovation

As the result of a quick Twitter back-and-forth, I told @JeffNugent and @mcglaysia that I would write a blog post about the research linking technology integration and student achievement.  A couple of points before I get into it:

• I have been the lead investigator on many (maybe a dozen or so?) studies aimed at examining the relationship between technology integration and student achievement.  These studies ranged from small studies (one or two schools) to federally-funded, statewide investigations.  So, I have a pretty decent practical understanding of this body of research and how the work gets done.  Some day I’ll write about the politics and the nitty gritty of this sort of work.  For now, though, I’ll just say that the old joke is more true than it is funny: “educational research is like sausage.  If you like to consume either one, you don’t want to watch it being made.”
• This pool of literature is deep and getting deeper all the time.  I can’t possibly get to everything.  In fact, I’m only going to cover those with which I am most familiar.  That means, I’m not necessarily presenting the “best” research; just those that I know of and that I think are reasonably respectable.
• The Ed. Tech. Action Network (ETAN) has done a decent job of summarizing some of the research.  You can find their page with lots of links here.
• Finally, I’m not terribly proud of my work in this area.  I know that advocates of ed. tech. say that we MUST show positive student achievement effects to move the policy agenda forward.  But, for me, student achievement, especially as typically measured in these studies, is not even close to the most important outcome we need to be considering when evaluating the impact of technology in education.  I’m much more interested in outcomes such as student engagement and student learning (as distinct from student achievement).

Anyway, onward…

*The study that’s getting the most attention and that is politically loaded is one that is still being undertaken.  Mathematica, Inc., along with SRI, two of the major independent research firms in the country, have been contracted to conduct The National Study of the Effectiveness of Educational Technology Interventions.  The project’s website contains all the information you need to know about the study, including the first report which was issued last year.  So far, after one year, according to the press release issued at the time of the release of the report, “On average, after one year, products did not increase or decrease test scores by amounts that were statistically different from zero.”  So, no link between tech. and achievement.  But, that was after one year. The next report should be out soon.

*I’ve been pleased with the amount of attention the West Virginia study I co-lead in 1998-99 has received over the last decade.  The report from that study documents fairly significant positive relationships between the use of computers and student achievement.

*Harold Wenglinsky has done some significant work in this field.  His first major study, conducted in 1998 while he was at ETS, demonstrated that under the right conditions, the use of computers in schools was positively related to math achievement.  More specifically, “higher mathematics scores were related to adequate access to computer technology (hardware, software, and overall infrastructure) in conjunction with teachers trained in technology use and the use of computers to learn new, higher-order concepts.”

*The USEiT (Use, Support, and Effect of Instuctional Technology) study, stands out to me for its high quality and for the quality of the many reports that have been disseminated from that one study.  Take a look, particularly, at Reports 10 and 13.  Of the many findings coming from that study, the researchers discovered that “students who reported greater frequency of technology use at school to edit papers were likely to have higher total English/language arts test scores and higher writing scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) than students who did not.”  I still use some of the scales that the USEiT researchers developed for my own work.

*Finally, and more recently, Missouri’s eMints program has been well-documented and thoroughly studied.  There’s an entire page of research reports, including the most recent analysis of student achievement.  eMints has been consistently positively associated with student achievement.

There’s more; gobs more.  If you cross-reference the works I’ve pointed to, you’ll be well on your way to collecting a critical mass of the work that’s been done in this area.

Tags: achievement, education, research, technology

I’ve long had an idea of what kind of school I’d like my child(ren?) to attend, but I’ve had a hard time articulating it.  Fortunately, there are plenty of smart and creative bloggers and academicians out there that help me learn and think.  In fact, I still can’t articulate everything fully, so you’ll have to settle for a few links.

So, for me, the future of schooling is approximately:

THIS +THIS + THIS + THIS + THIS

Ubiquitous computing and, therefore, ubiquitous learning.  Knowledge as rhizomatic and negotiated.  IEPs for every child.

I can dream, right?

Tags: education, future, knowledge, learning, school

I think I’m on to something here (of course I do; why else would I be writing this?)…

A. There have been smatterings of dissatisfaction with the recently concluded NECC, particularly among the more experienced and “followed” edubloggers (see e.g. Will and Karl)

B. Great discussions about systemic educational change have been occurring in the edublogosphere, especially over at Chris Lehmann’s blog and Will Richardson’s blog.

I think part of the reason for A is a desire for what’s being discussed in B.

I say that because NECC (the subject of A) is ALL about the micro.; it’s about pedagogy, classroom tools, projects, etc.    The subject of B is macro; it’s about changing the “system.”

So, here’s my proposal.  Let NECC (and ISTE) be what it is; a place to learn about technology integration; a VERY important place for LOTS of educators.  CoSN’s annual conference, on the other hand, is the place where learning and conversations about policy, leadership, change can happen.  Apparently, CoSN doesn’t think professors (or higher ed. more generally) are worthy of attending their shindig, but I’m likely to crash their party next year (besides, I’ve been dying to go to Austin, TX anyway!).

Tags: COSN, education, NECC, policy, technology