Ed Tech – Page 23 – Chris Betcher

December 26, 2009March 5, 2011

The Wisdom of Leo

I’m a big fan of Leo Laporte. Leo is best known these days for running the TWiT network (This Week in Tech), a podcasting empire that publishes more than a dozen excellent tech podcasts like MacBreak Weekly, This Week in Tech, This Week in Google, FLOSS Weekly, Windows Weekly, Net@Night and quite a few others, but he comes from a background in traditional radio and TV media. Leo has a wonderful, easy-to-listen-to manner, has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry better than anyone I know, and is always covering the latest, most interesting stories in tech. It’s easy to stay current with the latest tech goings-on just by listening to one (or more) of his podcasts. I listen to at least three of them reguarly, and others when I have more time… my drive to work just wouldn’t be the same without Leo!

This clip is a recording of a live stream from a talk given by Leo to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. It goes for about 40 minutes, but if you’re looking for some excellent explanations of how and why the media landscape is changing, you really should take a listen to what he has to say.

Some of my favourite quotes from this talk:

On the economics of online advertising: If you think the newspapers and the television stations are in trouble now, just wait a few years, because Facebook and Google offer advertisers the holy grail. When you buy an ad on those platforms, you’re buying an ad from somebody who is interested in buying your product. They’re pre-qualified. Yeah, I can get 18 million on Seinfeld, but I have to pay for 18 million – I only want to talk to 100,000. On Facebook and Google I get that 100,000 and no more. It’s hugely valuable, and they’re not going to pay these princely sums for these audiences anymore. That model is dead.”

On the future of traditional media: “Newspapers were invented to distribute display ads, and they just stuck some stuff in between the display ads. As soon as display ads don’t work, which they’re not, it’s going to go away… (newspapers) will be the realm of the rich person. We’ve seen revolutions like this before. When Gutenberg invented movable type in the 15th century, before that, only the very rich could afford a book because it had to be hand-written by a monk. The printing press made all this accessible. Did it kill books? No, but it changed fundamentally what a book is. So if you look really short term, yeah TV didn’t kill radio or the movies, we still have all that… but I think we are in a much more fundamental transition… Will blockbuster movies go away? Probably not, but I think you’re going to start to see far more small films created by kids with digital cameras. This YouTube generation is going to change everything. I think way we understand movies, the way we understand newspapers is going to go away.”

On the role of Twitter: “Twitter is brilliant, but I think it’s just the first iteration of what will eventually be an internet nervous system that you’ll be plugged into, and the zeitgeist will flow around you at all times. I think there’s better ways to do it than Twitter. I think we participate in it as journalists… we’re actually the input, we’re the ones who are putting content into it, and then people stir it and churn it around. Twitter is at it’s best, not when you say ‘I had toast for breakfast’, but when you say ‘Did you read this great article?’ If you really use Twitter properly, if you check it regularly, you don’t have any fear any more that you’re going to miss something, do you? Because you just know. If you follow the right people, the stuff you care about, you just know.”

On getting attention online: “The science fiction author Howard Sturgeon said ‘80% of everything is crap’, and I think there’s some of you right now that might say it’s more like 99% of everything is crap. There’s all this stuff now, and how does stuff surface. I believe that the 1% of the great stuff will just surface. As this internet nervous system gets more developed, word of mouth becomes more efficient and great stuff rises. Soon, you will no longer be able to use mainstream media as a launching pad. The answer, I think now, is the same as it should always have been – the best content. The way to get good is by doing great stuff. Do the best stuff you can, do the stuff you care the most about so that your passion shines through, because people love it when you’re passionate. And if your passion shines through and you’re doing great stuff, I believe that this new internet nervous system will surface you. So yeah, there’s a lot of crappy YouTube videos, there’s a lot of stupid Twitterers – there’s a lot of crap, there’s more crap than ever before – but at the same time, there’s more great stuff than ever before. Just do good stuff.”

As an educator, I think that last quote contains the real truth that we need to be encouraging out of our students, ourselves and our colleagues. “Do the best stuff you can, do the stuff you care the most about so that your passion shines through, because people love it when you’re passionate.”

Thanks Leo.

December 7, 2009

Staying On Message

Over the last year or so, I’ve been invited to present at a number of conferences, including a couple of keynotes. It’s been an enriching experience, and one I enjoy immensely, although I do always end up feeling like I’m “a mile wide and and inch deep”, to coin a well-worn phrase. I feel like I know quite a bit about a lot, but not a lot about anything. Despite the fact that I like to dabble in lots of stuff, I’m not sure I’m really a master of any of it.

This afternoon, I was asked to run some workshops for another Sydney school, to talk with some of their staff as they prepare to launch on a journey of 1:1 student computing next year. I took a workshop session with a small group for an hour, then presented a keynote to the whole staff for 45 minutes, followed by facilitating some planning and goal setting with a small group of teachers. I took an approach with today’s sessions that I rarely do… I prepared nothing in advance. Normally when I present, I spend hours beforehand, collecting resources, planning what I want to say and figuring out the best way to say it. I assemble a presentation, set up a wiki page and so on, and go into the presentation fully prepared.

Today I didn’t. I just rocked up, opened my Macbook and essentially asked, “what would you like to talk about?” There were reasons for that… It was partly because I wasn’t given a lot of notice for these sessions, so I didn’t have any time to put together something super organised. The other reason is that the brief was pretty open-ended, without a really firm outline for what needed to be covered. But mostly, I went in there ready to fly by the seat of my pants because I’ve come to understand that I can. I do actually have a good enough overall knowledge of technology, of education, of what I think is important, what I believe matters in education, and a pretty good mental catalog of what resources I have at my disposal. I find it relatively easy (and I quite prefer) to “make it up as I go along”, just me and a web browser. Conversations can’t be planned in advance, and I wanted these sessions to be more of a conversation than a lecture. In fact I started the workshop by opening a Google Doc, and asking the group “what do you want to talk about today?” Their responses – the differences between Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, the use of blogs versus wikis versus discussion forums, and useful Web 2.0 tools for the classroom; these were not things I would have predicted in advance, but were apparently what this groups wanted or needed. We explored a number of other ratholes, including an exploration of Wikipedia and how it works, along with some simple ideas for developing a PLN. I thought the session went well, and the feedback was positive.

But it was during the keynote that I actually learned a lot about myself. Again, I didn’t prepare anything in advance, but simply had the topic “ICT in my school: Lessons learned” as a starting point. My reasoning for not preparing was that I live this stuff every day… I shouldn’t need to “prepare a talk” to give this talk.

Having listened to a lot of presenters at a lot of conferences over the last few years, I’ve noticed that many of them have a consistent message. A theme. A common thread. Some, even almost a mantra. There are influential people within this ed-tech sphere that have their own important message to share, and they become almost synonymous with their message. They talk about all sorts of stuff, but they manage to stay “on message” all the time. I’d often wondered to myself, as I shotgunned around all sorts of interesting but largely unrelated ICT topics, “What’s Chris Betcher’s consistent message?” What is the one thing that underpins all the other stuff I’m interested in? It’s easy to be a dabbling dilettante and be interested in lots of different things, but it’s harder to have some sort of consistent structure that it all hangs off. I had no idea what mine was…

And here’s what I learned about myself as I talked to this group today with no particular agenda. I do have a message. There were consistent themes I found myself coming back to over and over, themes that are really at the core of what I believe education is all about.

Trust in people. I honestly believe that, by and large, most people are good people with right intentions and will naturally do the right thing if given a choice. This belief has implications on how you treat those around you – colleagues, students and others. It affects how you manage your schools, how you build community, how you interact with your students, how you design learning tasks. My basic belief in people permeates every decision I make in every interaction with others. I was asked by a teacher today for strategies to help deal with kids in a 1:1 environment, and my answer, without even thinking about it, was “Build trust”. I don’t think it’s the answer she was looking for, but I honestly believe that it was the best answer I could possibly offer. Trust your students. Trust that they will do the right thing because the work you give them is interesting enough and they want to do their best at it. Trust that they would much rather do the right thing than the wrong thing. I know that there are many who think this is a Pollyanna attitude; that you should plan for the worst rather than budget for the best, but that has never worked for me.

Have high expectations. I also believe that kids are far more capable than we usually give them credit for, and that by and large we present them with fairly small-minded tasks that require fairly small-minded efforts. We ask them to write a few paragraphs when they are capable of writing a short novel. We give them tasks that are too uninteresting, too unchallenging, too mundane, and we too often short-change their potential to be great. We need to set the bar high, expecting greatness from them, pushing them to exceed the capacity they, and we, often mistakenly believe they have. Trust that they will meet your expectations. I always expect the best, especially from kids, and I usually get it.

Understand what a teacher is supposed to do. I don’t, and have never, believed that the role of a teacher is simply to “teach” students by imparting a fixed body of knowledge. We are so much more than that. Our job is to know our students well enough that we can find interesting things for them to do, things that help them see their world in ways that they have never thought about, then provide them access to the resources, tools and ideas they need to explore those interesting things, getting out of their way enough that we don’t impede their own natural progress, yet available enough to help them when they require it. I truly believe this is my job. I’m not there to do it for them. I’m not there to watch them fail. I’m there to connect them and their interests to a world of possibilities they have not yet discovered for themselves.

I don’t think teaching is all that difficult, and I suspect we usually overcomplicate it with a whole lot of stuff that just clouds the issue. There are standards and outcomes and requirements for graduating, sure. But the real focus of education is pretty simple. Help your kids find their passions. Trust that they can. Believe that they will. And get out of their way while they do it.

That’s my mantra. That’s my message.

Image: ‘Slide‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11705469@N07/2047419687

December 1, 2009

K12 Online Conference starts today

Of all the conferences and professional development events I’ve taken part in over the last few years, the K12 Online Conference is the one that I think has had the most impact. Not surprisingly, because unlike many “one-hit” conferences that are over at the end of the weekend, K12 Online rolls out over an extended two week period, releasing several presentations each day on a wide range of topics. These presentations are all in some multimedia format, usually a video, but they could be in whatever format the presenter chooses, and they live on permanently beyond the actual conference itself. It really is, as they say, the conference that never ends.

The K12 Online Conference started in 2006 as the brainchild of a couple of North American teachers. If you want the full story of the conference and how it started, you might like to listen to episode 16 of the Virtual Staffroom podcast where I got to interview those who started it. Ever since that first year, I’ve looked forward to K12 Online each year. There’s an incredible effort behind it… I can vouch for that, as I volunteered to be on one of the organising subcommittees in 2007 and 2008, and I’ve also contributed presentations in 2008 and 2009. So I can tell you from first hand experience that there is a huge amount of work that takes place behind the scenes, from many passionate and committed educators, to make this all happen.

Anyway, the 2009 conference, with the theme “Bridging the Divide” was officially opened today with a pre conference keynote from the fabulous Kim Cofino. Like everything Kim does, it’s full of passion and insight into what it means to be an effective teacher in the 21st century. I’ll embed it here, but you should probably head over to the K12 Online site and check out all the other stuff going on there.

Once you’ve watched it, go check out the schedule of stuff that will be released over the next few weeks. There’s something for everyone.

Then once you have seen the schedule, make sure you grab some of the presentations for this year’s conference. Heck, why not subscribe to one of the RSS feeds and get them as they are released. You won’t regret it.