Vision-ary Committee

I just returned from the Internet Librarian conference and there was a lot of talk about gaming technology and how “searching” may change in the next few years.   A company called Sirsi/Dynix is working on software which allows you to locate things in the library virtually–sort of a video game format, and you, the customer, are a character moving through the space.  

Other mind blowing topics–a lcd projector the size of a sugar cube, a credit card sized palm pilot device, virtual DVD instead of a physical dvd, etc.

One thing the speaker, Stephen Abrams talked about is how we need to teach kids to wade through information–and that is a vital need right now.  They are already inundated and will be even more so as information continues to grow exponentially.

He presented the characteristics of a Millenial student which is defined by Richard Sweeney in this chart

(see the powerpoint slide link here — http://www.sirsi.com/Pdfs/Company/Abram/StephenAbram_KidsAreAlright4.ppt#19 .

Another good slide showing characteristics of our “future” graduates–

http://www.sirsi.com/Pdfs/Company/Abram/StephenAbram_KidsAreAlright4.ppt#43

Lots of food for thought here–Carolyn

I heard a very interesting session today by Stephen Abrams (who Ian Jukes recommended).   His blog is Stephen’s Lighthouse, by the way, if any of you are interested.

He talked a lot about current brain research, video games and how we can utilize them for student learning, and the importance of students having real life experiences on the internet.

He pointed out that we don’t train them to cross the street with a fake street in a classroom–we teach them on the real street and that we should be doing the same with the internet.

He talked about the importance of students’ publishing on the web and all the ways the new 2.0 web allows for that.  He also strongly felt that the trend is toward “virtual” search environments–that is, a library catalog that is like a virtual experience or game that the student would move through, or a course designed that way. 

What he said had interesting implications for our committee and I am eager to read his blog.  http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com/

I am also definitely feeling techno overwhelm, which is definitely a good reminder to me of how teachers and students can feel sometimes.  

I do think, though, that all these tools will become a part of our experiences and then the learning curve will not be the way it is right now.  Stephen Abrams pointed out that our knowledge base has been in a resting period while the web was “sorted out” but now we are entering a stage where things are growing exponentially and so it will be a time of revolutionary change for our students.     I guess our job will be to help them balance all of this.

Time to go walk outside and listen to the ocean and clear my mind a little bit….

Carolyn

I’m on my way to the Internet Librarian conference in San Jose, sitting next to a supply-chain manager for Cisco who lives in California, manages an operation in Austin, and also one in Malaysia, while I look through subjects at the conference in the program.

And by the way, she’s reading The World is Flat!

So far, in looking through the conference program, I have already found sessions on using ipods, blogs, RSS, wikis, and ebooks in schools and libraries, a website about teaching global issues, a tour of social networking sites(i.e. myspace and facebook), and sessions on how to improve webpage design.    Engineers from Google and Microsoft are  part of a panel speaking in an evening session about “academic search” (i.e. searching for scholarly articles) and how that area is being completely transformed because of Google, etc,, and what are the changes ahead for libraries and publishers because of that.    And that’s all only the first day!   I’m going to be learning a lot.

I’ll share what I’m learning as I have time by posting to the blog! –Carolyn

In listening to everyone at the last committee meeting, I think we do have a strike a balance between our excitement about future (and present) technologies and overwhelm.

This article in Technology and Learning is a good example–http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193200296

It provides a lot of ideas and a vision for what a technology-transformed campus could be like, but reading it seems overwhelming even to me!

How do we find that balance?

On another note, I was excited that our plan to bring something out of this committee to reality–our mini-workshops for teachers–is already happening!

We had our first one yesterday.  I do think “mini” approaches may be a good way to gradually bring in some of these technology tools to our teachers, so maybe that is one way to avoid overwhelm?  (I really didn’t plan to answer my own question–that just occurred to me as I was writing this!)

What are other ways we can help keep that overwhelm balanced as we move to a more technology rich classroom?

I’m sure all of us have run across a lot of articles, websites, etc, about technologies on the near horizon, so I thought I would create a thread for us to share some of them.

This is a blog called Ideas and Thoughts from an Ed Tech. Lots of musings.  http://ideasandthoughts.org/

Another favorite:  http://www.weblogg-ed.com/   A lot of ideas about reading and writing on the web and how it will affect students.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep up with all the articles I’ve been finding also, and been experimenting with a few websites that might be helpful if you haven’t tried them.

Furl, Delicious, and Google all have capabilities to store your links online, so no matter what computer you are using, you can add websites to your lists and organize them.

Google’s is called Google Notebook and is probably the most traditional looking.  You can create sections or subjects so you can visually organize your links.  (You can find Google notebook under the “more” button under Google Labs.)

Del.icio.us also allows you to save your links online, but it organizes them by “tags” or subjects that you designate and group together.   It’s a little more nontraditional, but the “tags” allow you to set up keyword type searching for your articles.  You can install a button on your Internet Explorer toolbar, and just click on it to add a site to your list of links.  www.del.icio.us

I haven’t experimented with Furl yet, but the idea is similar.  http://www.furl.net/

One unique advantage to these is that you can keep your links “private” or make them “public” or parts of them, and share with others.  So you could compile a list of links and share it with the whole committee.  Food for thought!

So share any articles here that have struck your fancy lately…and let’s talk!

My mind is still racing with thoughts from our discussion last night, so I wanted to create a couple of new posts to help us sort our thoughts.  This first one is the “Future Graduate” so we can start discussing that and finding articles and links to share, and the second post is going to be “How do we get there?”

(Actually—a warning—I spent 45 minutes typing my post and when I went to publish it,edublogs had lost it.  (then when I went back later, it reappeared! So a word to the wise, if you think it’s going to take you a while, work in Word and post it later!) 

One thread we talked a lot about last night was the future graduate from the college perspective.  Hearing Dr. Chang’s perspective really drives home the value of the vertical teaming aspect that we were talking about—and I think if we have both the college perspective and bring in the perspective from the elementary school level in our own district that would really give us a lot of insights.

We talked a lot about the future science/math/computer science trends, which were fascinating.  I was surprised to hear that the projections are that U.S. colleges will turn out only ¼ of the graduates needed in computer science by the year 2014.   We also talked a lot about other math/science graduation trends.

Having more idea of future trends really would inform our discussion better, so I thought I would start out by listing a few links to some “trend” statistics.

The Occupational Outlook handbook has many helpful links, but for a quick glance, here is their projection of the fastest growing occupations from 2004-2014.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/mlrtab2.pdf

(and if you really want to peruse more of their projections, here is a link to more.http://www.bls.gov/emp/home.htm#outlook

America’s Career InfoNet  is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.  This link allows you to manipulate occupational data for Texas.  It shows the growth rate in actual jobs, and then in percentage growth–very interesting trends there in health sciences and computer sciences, for example.

http://www.acinet.org/acinet/state1.asp?next=state1&id=11&nodeid=12&soccode=&stfips=48&x=47&y=13

The Texas Workforce Commission allows you to manipulate projections of data for different regions of Texas.  So if you pick Central Texas in the category “Industry Projections,” it creates a chart showing the growth rates of particular fields.

I was really astonished to see that the field with the highest growth rate in central Texas was Education, actually, which topped out at 54% projected growth rate.  The second fastest growing field in central Texas is Health and Social Sciences, according to this projection.

Here is the link so we can explore these charts:

http://www.tracer2.com/?PAGEID=67&SUBID=114

Anyway, that is some information to start us off…