The Future of Blogs

That’s the title of one of four, count ‘em, four different presentations I’ll be giving at MACUL on Friday. (How I got talked into that I’ll never know!) When I originally submitted the idea, I saw it as a way to show how blogs in schools were evolving and branching out, and to have a conversation on the ways in which they would continue to mature. And while I still see that being a part of it, I’m feeling like the bigger, and in some ways, more important discussion is what we need to do to insure that blogs in schools even have a future. I don’t mean that in a defeatist sense as I obviously believe these tools need to play an important part in our teaching and practice. I mean it in the “what are the obstacles and how do we overcome them” sense. So I’d like to start the presentation early here by looking at the most widely articulated impediments to adoption of the tools and offering some very thin, discussion starting ideas about how we might respond to them. This assumes, of course, that you believe (as I do) that these tools can make significant contributions to our practice and to our (and our students’) learning, that they in fact do have the potential to fundamentally improve what we do in the classroom. And, it assumes that we all have access.

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Smooth scaling into the multimedia future

The Nokia Developer Newsletter this week (02.28.06) features scalable screen drawing as its lead article, and describes what that is in these words:

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A virtual conversation on the future of education - come one, come all!

Educon 2.0 is this weekend, January 26 & 27. This “un-conference” is being held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia to discuss the future of education. There are no traditional presentations - the agenda is to create conversations on various topics, and to not be restricted by time or space. No small vision here!

So - here’s your chance. Please join in the conversation!

Not only will there be a free-flowing conversation in the room, each session has access to a Ustream channel and a wiki associated with it. Ustream is an online video streaming site that can broadcast live video feeds. If the technology gods smile on us, we will be ustreaming the conversation live. People can participate by watching online and text chatting their comments, contributions, and virtual rotten tomatoes. I hope to have someone at the session act as the moderator for the ustream chat and bring comments and conversation into the room.

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iPhone review confirms the future of learning

In David Pogue’s New York Times (enthusiastic!) review here of Apple’s new iPhone, two powers of the phone are present and functional that come together to truly make 20th century content delivery obsolete. 1) The phone is robustly wireless. 2) The full Internet can be browsed both on the (too slow AT&T network) to which the iPhone is now limited and wirelessly (very fast) in hot spots. The full Internet aspect has a magnification feature: your screen displays the entire width of webpages, and when you want to look more closely at a portion of the page you magnify it by touching the screen with two fingers, spreading the portion you choose to make it bigger.

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NECC Panel-The Future of Edblogging

Over at ETI, Tom is writing about the future of blogging in preparation for our NECC panel in a couple of weeks. I’m cross posting this back over there in response.

My take on the future of blogging differs from Tom’s in some respects. Specifically, I don’t agree that the practice of reading and writing in blogs will remain unchanged in 10 years. If fact, I would doubt that blogs in their current iteration will be around in 10 years. To compare blogs to e-mail is, I think, to say that, like e-mail, blogging has only one fairly restrictive use. I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, Tom points out correctly that blogs have already evolved from basic link lists with little annotation to a more complex form of exposition, which is, ironically, a change he’s been fighting against and I’ve been fighting for.

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Edublogosphere.com, a future centralized back channel?

I got this idea from some tweets last night, specifically from watching budtheteacher backchannel a workshop. It got interesting, especially when D’Arcy Norman backed away due to the high volume of tweets.

What if we had a space to always use as a central back channel? What would this space look like?

What if we collectively create it on a space at www.edublogosphere.com?

I would say it needs a…

1. Chat room that archives chats and makes them searchable

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Shaping our Future: Toward a Pan-Canadian Elearning Research Agenda

I'm pleased (and for that matter, even excited) to announce an upcoming online conference - Shaping our Future: Toward a Pan-Canadian Elearning Research Agenda. The conference will run for a period of three weeks, beginning May 12. While our focus is on the Canadian context, I think anyone involved in research and learning technologies will be able to benefit from the conference. Registration is available by clicking on the "login" button top right of the page.

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Can the past accept the future in education?

I hope so. The future of our children continues to be at stake as the pre-digital dominance in education continues to cope with the growing intrusion of the digital, virtual, connecting world. From a completely irrelevant source comes an insightful statement of the problem in this struggle. New York Times book reviewer Caroline Weber writes today about The Diana Chronicles, Tina Browns new book about the saga of Princess Diana. Weber writes:

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Ingredients of the future of learning

Writer Bruno Giussanis blog LunchoverIP has an article this week here called Dont speak. Point! Three ingredients of the future of journalism. What Giussani has to say is an insightful look at the significant changes that the Internet is bringing to communication in general and journalism in particular.

The article points out confusion and discomfort that naturally are caused by change and the fact that no one can really predict where the we are going. The article is informative on what those changes are, and it is essentially optimistic. Giussani concludes with three things he predicts for the future of journalism.

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Creating our future

Last night I attended our town’s Business Retention & Expansion briefing, which reported on findings from a study conducted last year. One of the findings was that the local business priority is to attract industry to the town. Key issues for local businesses were cost of leasing space; municipal taxes; availability of zoned land and land costs. The local economic development agency stated that it would help businesses in the area through training, mentorship and supporting tourism. The town’s strategy will be a “build it and they will come” approach, focusing on a few key sectors and attempting to attract businesses in those areas.

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