{"id":13,"date":"2010-02-01T09:17:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T09:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.195.124.246\/~wisecon1\/blog\/?p=13"},"modified":"2010-02-01T09:17:30","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T09:17:30","slug":"first-reflections-on-educon-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"First Reflections on Educon 2.2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Educon 2.2 <\/a>is something of an un-conference.  Instead of presentations, facilitators lead conversations. The conference is hosted at the Science Leadership Academy<\/a>,
\na public charter school in Philadelphia, led by Chris Lehmann.  Over
\n500 educators from primary and secondary schools, a handful of school
\nadministrators and higher education professionals attended.  Largely,
\nthis group self-selects.  Many pay their own way, all give up a weekend
\nto be there.  It's one of the best educational gatherings that I've had
\na chance to participate in.   <\/p>\n

My head is still spinning, but
\nI'm going to highlight three areas:  1) the overall participatory
\nenvironment at SLA and the conference  2) Jeff Han on Multi-touch
\ninteraction experiments and finally, 3) a conversation that I
\nfacilitated about online teaching and learning.  <\/p>\n

1) Students
\nmanaged all of the logistics from tech support, to checking bags to
\nhelping people find sessions.  They also joined sessions and shared
\ntheir experiences.  That students were central to the conference
\npermeated all of the sessions and made the experience authentic in a
\nway that few conferences are. Chris Lehmann spoke about how he and his
\ncolleagues create this community on a session he facilitated about
\nleadership.  I'm a bit in awe of Chris–it's great to hear about it AND
\nsee it in action at SLA.<\/p>\n

2) Jeff Han presented Pixel Perfect, a spin off of his "multi-touch interaction research."  <\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

\nMore on Jeff and his work here: http:\/\/cs.nyu.edu\/~jhan\/ftirtouch\/index.html<\/a> 
\nJeff was eager to hear from us about how we could imagine the data
\nvisualization tool used in education.  It's worth looking at the videos
\nof Jeff showing how the touch screen works–but it feels like something
\nout of a movie, where instead of interacting through a keyboard we
\nmanipulate data with our hands.  At a glance, one might think, oh, it's
\nan interactive whiteboard–but it's much, much more than that.   Many
\npeople can be on the board at the same time, it's as sensitive as an
\niPad's touch screen and it's wicked fast.  Jeff argues that we have
\nplenty of processing power, but that we're not making enough advances
\nfrom the interface side.  He also envisions a day when the technology
\nis as cheap and ubiquitous as wall paper. From an educational use
\nperspective, we imagined ideas for collaborative writing projects,
\nvirtual dissections and geographic analysis, but somehow I wished that
\nwe picked a few specific curricular contexts and started with
\neducational goals.  Nevertheless, it was an amazing conversation.<\/p>\n

3) I facilitated a conversation on online teaching and learning best practices<\/a>. 
\nI was struck by the deep and broad interest in online learning as a
\nmeans of both student engagement and continued professional development
\nfor educators.  Barbara Treacy, the Director of EdTech Leaders Online<\/a>, 
\na capacity building program for K-12 organizations, among other
\neducators, joined in the conversation, along with other teachers who
\nare designing educational experiences.  Barbara posted their checklist for educators designing their own online courses<\/a>  as well as basic tips for online facilitation<\/a>.    Sean Musselman posted a podcast summarizing the session<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

I am still processing the event, but I am glad that I was able to have conversations with educators about our open Educational Technologist <\/a> opportunity, want to check out the mind map that David Warlick posted http:\/\/www.xmind.net\/share\/_embed\/dwarlick\/sunday-morning-panel\/ <\/a><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
I
\nwould like to thank all of my peers at Educon for making it such a
\nwonderful event, to Chris Lehmann, and the teachers, students and
\nparents at SLA and of course, Kristen Sosulski and the NYU-SCPS for
\ngiving me something to talk about.<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Educon 2.2 is something of an un-conference.  Instead of presentations, facilitators lead conversations. The conference is hosted at the Science Leadership Academy, a public charter school in Philadelphia, led by Chris Lehmann.  Over 500 educators from primary and secondary schools, a handful of school administrators and higher education professionals attended.  Largely, this group self-selects.  Many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,2,8],"tags":[6,4,3],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-education","category-webtech","tag-education-2","tag-learning","tag-teaching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wisecontradictions.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}