Alan November at NECC 2008

Alan November's talk has finally been uploaded to the kzo innovations NECC 2008 videocasts.

Alan begins his talk with a story about his son and an excursion to China. He then talks about how social networking stuff is blocked in most schools.

He then uses a Promethean Clicker system to pole the audience about "Who Owns Learning?" This clicker system allows users to immediately give "in real time" their answers to questions he asks. I remember using this system at NECC 2006 during one of the keynotes.

The rest of his talk is mediocre at best. He spends a great deal of his first half hour is self promotion plugging his book, name on the internet, his conference. Not the usual A.N. stuff. Oh, well, even the greats have days which are not their best.

NECC Live 2008

Our Students, Our Worlds

David Warlick, in this lunchtime session, gives a passionate talk about "World is Flat" concepts and how we should be making efforts to keep the arts alive in schools.

He talks about what digital students are all about. Most importantly he talks about how kids these days are all about technology in a different way than we were, back in the day.

Here is the link to all the NECC Live 2008 presentations.

Michael Wesch

George Seimens, who Keynoted at this year's Leading and Learning Conference in Toronto, has posted a link to the Michael Wesch lecture at the University of Manitoba. He talks about the skills that are really useful. And to think, he has only been teaching for 3 years. Remarkable!

Here is Professor Wesch's Youtube channel.

Extending the Boundaries with V.C.

David Jakes , Will Richardson and Ewan [Uen] McIntosh explore the possibilities of USTREAM.TV in the classroom. It is Video Conferencing for the masses. 

David showed screenshots of several collaborations using ustream. He asks -- How does this change the nature of a classroom. Publishing and extending. Bringing learning to students. "Classroom permeability". 

Ewan talked about a new student production Channel 4 television in the U.K. A project called "YearDot" which is an example of a 10 part documentary which includes 15 young people who have film crews follow them around for 1 year and then publish the finished documentary on channel 4 at that time. 

Ewan talked about student productions and the care it takes to produce films. He talks about the reflective nature [or not] of conversations which happen after the fact. He talks about the quality of production and illustrated by talking about Ken Robinson's Ted talk, Marco Torres ican stuff. Ewan also talked about how people want to watch video on their own terms these days. He concludes by saying that the web streaming technology is about allowing people to have a conversation.