I have been noticing more and more informal meetups developing at the fringes of formal conferences. You attend a conference and discover that special interest groups are getting together less formally to share ideas during breaks and in the off-conference hours.

I have heard events of this type called meetups, unconferences, collaborative conferences and barcamps and I wrote about a Classroom 2.0 free meetup at the start of this year.

I want to share another one that I noticed this past week. It is occurring as a pre-conference event at the NECC Conference (National Educational Computing Conference). It is billed as EduBloggerCon / Classroom 2.0 "LIVE in San Antonio" on June 28, 2008. It's a full day meetup of educators using blogs and other collaborative technologies. They invite bloggers, blog readers and those who want to enter that world. What makes it an unconference is that it is pretty much being organized by the participants in real time on the wiki site. They are also sharing information on what sessions they plan to attend. The group does have (through the generosity of organizer ISTE) access that day to rooms at the Convention Center and free wi-fi.

I have never attended NECC - scared off by the reports of attendees of the overwhelming nature of this big conference. Does this meetup effect make a big conference seem smaller & more personal - or does it make it even busier? (Things to do during the breaks!) I'd love to hear from past attendees and unconference fans about their experiences.

Another happening is the NECC "Unplugged at the Bloggers Cafe" (also called "NECC 2.0," the NECC "Fringe" Festival, and the NECC "Unconference - I hope we settle on a name for all this). This runs over the 3 days and is also being scheduled by the participants and happens in the open lounge areas. Right now they list 7 types of sessions and it's interesting to see some new takes on the standard presentation and poster sessions format of many conferences.

1. from the more formal "Birds of a Feather" sessions which are actually scheduled by NECC
2. to "Speed Demos" - 5 minute (max) demonstrations of Web 2.0 programs or uses
3. "Short Talks" 7 minute talks (they compare it to the TED Talks and suggest "if you got formally turned down for a NECC session... now you can say you presented at NECC").
4. "Facilitated Discussions" - group discussion with volunteer facilitators, topics proposed online
5. "Panel Discussion" - find some panelists & a moderator, and put yourselves in the schedule.
6. "Success Stories" - your own success stories to showcase and for discussion in 30-minute blocks around specific topics (e.g., "Blogging with young students")
7. and finally "Daily Wrap Ups"

There are many "charities" that you might turn to during this holiday season. One I chose to write about this Thanksgiving Day has a strong web connection and an interesting approach to the idea of helping.

It's Kiva, a site that provides loans to the working poor. Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. Kiva is a Swahili word meaning "unity."

You can choose someone who is requesting a loan on Kiva.org and "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor reach for economic independence.

The loans run about 6-12 months and you can receive email updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

I don't know if this is a good project for a class or school group to do, but it's an interesting economics and flat world model to at least explore with a class. It's "microfinance" and I know there are other examples online of providing financial services to the poor in developing countries. Your small, short-term "microloans" goes to poor entrepreneurs who don't otherwise have access to capital. Maybe a student council or student government association could enroll.

Kiva follows the principal that teaching a man to fish is better than simply giving him fish. Recipients "already know how to fish, they just need a loan so they can buy a net," says Fiona Ramsey, spokeswoman for microloan facilitator Kiva. Through Kiva, people can loan sums as small as $25 to individual entrepreneurs they select on kiva.org. Kiva works with local microfinance institutions that screen all applicants and it says the default rate has been only 0.2%. Interest goes to support those microfinance groups rather than to the lenders.

Here's a sample from their site: Name: Santa Javier Doñe, Location: Sabana Grande de Boya Community of Yamasa, Dominican Republic Primary Activity: Clothing Sales; Loan Requested: $300 Repayment Term: 6 months - repaid monthly Loan Use: Purchase of new clothing products in bulk Posted: Nov 21, 2007 "Santa is twenty-eight years old, and she and her husband have two young girls, ages five and seven. Santa has recently begun selling women’s clothing and fashionable shoes to members of her community. Santa plans to use her loan to buy more clothing at bulk rates, improving her profit margin and limiting the number of trips she will have to make to purchase the clothing she sells outside of her community. Santa envisions her business becoming a “grand store” with a large selection of chic attire. She explains that the income from her business will help support her studies at the local university and help her to safeguard her children’s health."

Yo don't have to loan the entire $300 either. You can $25 dollars to the total. It's not "charity." In fact, loans made through Kiva are not tax-deductible because they aren't a charitable contribution. When a loan is repaid, the money can be either withdrawn or lent out again. You can even purchase "gift certificates" and let others select loans. They start at $25

  Angelica after her surgery.

I know that this is the start of the season for giving and the season for people asking you to give.

I sent out my donation last week to The Smile Train. It's a charity I feel confident in because I've done some reading about them and 100% of your donation goes towards programs that help children and 0% goes to overhead.

My donation is enough to pay for a cleft surgery which is a modern-day medical miracle. It's a surgery that would probably cost at least ten times that here in the U.S. and most people I know (including me) wouldn't hesitate a second to pay for it if it was our child. I'm sure the child who ends up getting the surgery from my donation will get a new smile and possibly a new life.

This blog has gone through several iterations for me.

Originally (before it was eduspaces, when this was elgg) I signed up because of the mentions I saw to it on Moodle sites as a blogging tool.

Since I already had two blogs that I was spending my time keeping full of content, I simply took the feeds from those (Poets Online and my edtech blog, Serendipity35) and pumped them into this space.

I felt a bit guilty about that. It seems lazy. Plus, the 2 topics don't mash up very well.

So, I took those RSS feeds out. Then I felt guilty about not posting anything new here.

I need to come up with anew direction for this space. Maybe just tech without education, or just my K-12 experiences instead of the K-20 ones?

Add to this that I started using Tumblr a few months ago and created yet another site (really just to see what it was all about) called Ronkville and that one pulls content from my poetry blog, Serendipity35, my Flickr photos, a friend's blog, and photos, sites and things I like on the web that I can add with a click. And I actually like ronk.tumblr.com a lot. It's all of my blogging and more all in one place.

So many apps, so little time.

* the illustration is from a t-shirt design from a cool site called threadless.com that I have written about earlier.

If you have a website or a blog you WANT all the search engines to find your pages and index them. You want to be found, so that others can find you. Right? There are companies that specialize in helping you get to the top of search results.

But there are situations when you don't want your web page to be found. Maybe it's a login page, or it contains somewhat sensitive material (though it can't be very sensitive since you're posting it on the Net!) or it might contain images that you don't want people finding in a search. Maybe it's a page that can only be viewed by a registered user or after logging in at another page, so you don't want it indexed (even if someone who clicks the Google link wouldn't be able to see it without logging in - surely this has happened to you at least once when you clicked some NY Times or Chronicle of Higher Education story link).

Realize that if your page isn't indexed by the search engines, it's highly unlikely that someone will just stumble upon it.

A good example is this blog. This entry will get a few dozen hits in the next week from our subscribers or regular visitors. But if I check the stats for this piece in six months, they will be much higher. (In fact, I just looked back 6 months in this blog and the entry from 9/26/06 has 1,258 hits now.) How does that happen? Well, that entry was indexed by Google and all the rest of the sites that send out their (ro)bots. So when someone searched on "podcast" or any of the other words in that piece (or in my tags), they found it.

So how do you stop those auto-searching, hungry little bots that Google and others send out to find new Net stuff? Google (I'm just going to say that to mean all search engines, OK?) has a set of computers that continually crawl the web. They know which sites have already been found and they read all the pages on each of those sites and they search for new ones and changes that have been made to the old ones. This collective of computers is known in Googleland as "Googlebot."

But webmasters can put a file called robots.txt on the server too which is a standard document that can tell the bots not to download some (or all) information from your web server.

I don't want to get too technical here. (That's Tim's job.) but I'll give you the basics and add a few links to sites where you can get a lot more information.

This method doesn't work with all bots, but it will stop most of the main ones. (Are you starting to envision all these bots as some kind of invading organism like in the 1960's movie Fantastic Voyage or that stuff that attacked the ship in The Matrix?

So that META tag would look like this:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> Then the robot should neither index this document, nor analyze it for links.

There is actually a format standard called the Robot Exclusion Standard.

If your page/site has been online a while, it probably has already been found and adding or changing your robots.txt file won't be immediately reflected in search results, but it will be discovered and used when the next bot crawls your site.

Google actually uses several user-agents, so you can block access to any or all of them. If you block "Googlebot" you stop the bot that looks for things for their web & news index, but if block "Googlebot-Mobile" you stop the one who crawls pages for their mobile index (maybe your pages aren't mobile-ready, so you want them ignored) or block "Googlebot-Image" to stop your images from being found.

There are fine tunings too. Look at this one - what do you think it does?

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /documents/
Allow: /documents/disclaimer.html

That would block all pages inside the folder/directory called "documents" except for that one disclaimer.html page.

My point is this - sometimes you just don't want to be found. Know how to hide. The bots are always out there...

http://www.robotstxt.org/

google.com/webmasters/ - lots of stuff for web folks about how to interact with Google.

And here is a good & simple 2 part blog entry from the Google folks about this topic:

googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/controlling-how-search-engines-access.html

googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-protocol.html

Chris Lehmann wrote a post a few days ago which referenced two other bloggers which often introduces me to other educators online. In this case, I first read something by Sylvia Martinez on Second Life, but what caught my attention was her apology that the entry is "both too long and too short. Too long for a blog, too short for real insight."

It's something that my grad students who were required to create blogs asked me last semester. How long, how short, how much detail, how is this writing different from the essay we might have been asked to submit?

I was equally interested at the end of semester to ask them if they thought their blogging (all newbies) had changed the way they were writing at all. No definitive answers, but it's something for me to write about here before the fall semester begins with a new group.

The other blogger referenced was Christian Long on think:lab who wrote:

I said to them then -- and say it now -- that we'd better become agile at the "What if all the digital tools disappear?" question and focus more on the "Has our teaching actually transformed?" question.

That's the question that has been running through my head the past few days. I even put it to a few teachers I was meeting with yesterday:

If all the technology you use in the classroom were gone tomorrow, would it still have affected the way you teach?

By "technology" I mean all of it - not only the computers & Net but the projectors (LCD or overhead), the films & videos, the cameras, the recorders, electronic gradebooks, word processors and the rest of the electronics. That may be taking it to the extreme.

The unit on Macbeth where you normally show the film versions, go to all the websites, record the students doing scenes, have the students research - now you have books, papers & pens, the blackboard, some props. It was taught that way when I was in high school. But would you in 2007 only be able to go back to that way of teaching, or would your teaching have been transformed by your use of technology?

If you were deep into using blogs and wikis and web resources with your students and it all went away, what would happen in class? If it's a return to a kind of teaching from the past, then somehow the effect of technology on education seems diminished.

If farmers or doctors lost all the technology created in the past 20 years, would they return to the methodologies of 1987?

Some thoughts that came up in my conversations with teacher (all of whom agreed that this is a tough question):

• What would still remain for the doctor, farmer & (hopefully) the teacher would be the knowledge they have gained by using technology.
• A classroom could still be read/write without technology - good teachers were doing it before the technology
• Word processing has changed the way we write and approach things like revision, including our willingness to do it because it's so much easier - still, people were not sure if how they changed could continue being done without the technology

One thing that came up in all my conversations was that this is "too hypothetical" and "the technology isn't going away" and that "you don't want to open discussions like this because it might lead administrator$ to say, so you don't really need all this expensive technology anyway."

I agree that the tech is not going away for most of us, though in some places it never arrived. I'll use an extreme example. Take that Will Richardson kind of teacher and send him to a third-world school without the technology and with a classroom full of intelligent but zero-tech-savvy students, and what would happen?

My suspicion is that he would still be teaching differently, but I'm hard-pressed to come up with the evidence or examples right now.

The Chris Lehmann post that I started with today is not all about this line of thought. He's mainly looking at curriculum design and reform, and he's asking questions like:

How can we create engaging schools? How can we teach students toward wisdom? How can we move beyond facts and skills and into enduring understandings and deep, connected learning? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and then we need to find the tools that support that vision, not the other way around.

He mentions the often-recommended Understanding By Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe which I had read back when the original edition came out. Looking at the book's Amazon description I find that it's full of questions too.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment?

What catches me in the end is that none of them mention technology or are asking questions about how to use technology. Is that an omission that needs to be corrected, or is it that these are exactly the kinds of questions that all of us in educational technology need to be asking?

As of May 30, 2007, Apple has put iTunes U into the main iTunes "store" beginning with 16 featured schools. They have since added search capability to include iTunes U content.

The iTunes U wiki by James Welsh found at itunesu.pbwiki.com has taken up the task of updating schools offering public content through iTunes U, and he includes information on other podcasting efforts. 

It has been 40 years since the "Summer of Love" in 1967 when a cultural focus turned to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and words like hippies and tie-dye entered the vocabulary.

The music of the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin and others became associated with that place too.

Scott McKenzie sang that, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair."

I was only 13 that summer. My dad had been sick for four years at that point and California seemed very far away, but very appealing.

There was a Time cover story, and I recall looking at photo spreads in Life magazine. Maybe that was signaling the explosion of general consciousness in America - or it was the beginning of the end already. In March 1966 Life's cover article was on this new psychedelic drug called LSD. It would be by that October.

Check out some of the music from the Summer of Love that we were listening to that year.

The Gray Line bus company started "Hippie Hop" tours - "If you look to your right, you can see 710 Ashbury, home to Jerry Garcia & The Grateful Dead."

I didn't make it there until I had doubled my age and my wife and I did a Tijuana, Mexico to Wine Country journey through California. I don't recall much about the Haight which was pretty rundown at that point - at least locals were telling us it wasn't a place to really walk around as tourists at night. There were panhandlers and ex-hippies (or pretenders) who had seen much better days. I did the obligatory tour to see City Lights Books and Golden Gate Park.

I went again with a co-worker in 2002 when we were at a tech conference in Silicon Valley. We also did Alcatraz - a nice contrast.

We walked past the mural done by Charles Lobdell on the side of the Methodist Church on Belvedere. It's a huh blend of hippies around a tree and the faces of Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Harry Truman (huh?), and Julie, Linc & Pete from TV's The Mod Squad.

The San Francisco Gate did a piece on all this and spoke to a few poets of the time & place. Here's Lawrence Ferlinghetti.


"Before, up through the Human Be-In, the Haight was really sort of innocent, clean. I remember the early Jefferson Airplane, which was very lyrical. I was going to Fillmore quite a bit. (Poet) Andre Voznesensky and I performed in between sets of the Jefferson Airplane at the old Fillmore. Bill Graham generously offered us the stage. I was reading translations of Andre's poems. He was doing them in Russian. There was a light show going on.
I was onstage right next to Allen Ginsberg at the Human Be-In. I had an autoharp, which I was playing in those days. Luckily, they never allowed me to perform because it would've been a disaster. There was a sea of 10,000 faces. Don't know how many they actually counted. I remember, in the sunset, this lone parachutist descended on the crowd."

Billy Collins writes in The Trouble With Poetry

as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

I started using Elgg just to see what it could do but since I already have 2 regular blog spots, I knew I couldn't sustain a third one. Hence the RSS feed pulling my entries from Serendipity35.

Now I'm feeling a bit guilty about only using this space as a "mirror" of the other blog's content.

Honestly, S35 gets a good amount of traffic, trackbacks, comments and carries some "authority" on Technorati. This Eduspaces version does not.  And do I want it to do that?

Actually, I may be diluting my readership or just making it confusing by having it in 2 places.

So, I'm taking down the RSS pull today. That means this site will go into hibernation for a bit (even though it's spring here in NJ-USA).

I'd like to think that perhaps I could use THIS space to blog on a flavor of EdTech (like my recent job change to a K-20 world) but that seems too time-intensive - plus, I can do that on Serendipity35 too.

Technorati says there are 70+ million blogs out there, but the real question is how many are active?   I don't want this to just be another dead node in the blogosphere.

I found this listing at http://social.front.lv and copied it over. (Luckily, "sweat of the brow" work can't be copyrighted.)

If you visit that site, you can read an explanation, but basically what it does is allow you to create bookmarklets for all these services from their site. Now, you can do that individually service by service too using the tools the service itself offers. For example, to add that bookmarklet tool for delicious if you use Firefox, go to del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension.

I imported this list not to offer the bookmarklet service, but because it's a quite a good list of social bookmarking sites. There are a number I use now (the big names mostly - Digg, delicious, Reddit, Technorati...) but also a bunch that I have never used or even seen mentioned.

Clicking any link here will take you to that site. You will need a free account to use any of these services.

1. Backflip
   
2. BlinkBits
   
3. Blinklist
   
4. blogmarks
   
5. BlogMemes
   
6. Buddymarks
   
7. CiteUlike
   
8. Complore
   
9. Connotea
   
10. del.icio.us
    
11. de.lirio.us
    
12. digg
    
13. FeedMarker
    
14. FeedMeLinks!
    
15. Furl
    
16. Give a Link
    
17. Gravee
    
18. Hyperlinkomatic
    
19. igooi
    
20. kinja
    
21. Lilisto
    
22. Linkagogo
    
23. Linkroll
    
24. looklater
    
25. Magnolia
    
26. maple
    
27. MesFavs
    
28. netvouz
    
29. Newsvine
    
30. Raw Sugar
    
31. reddit
    
32. Rojo
    
33. Scuttle
    
34. Segnalo
    
35. Shadows
    
36. Simpy
    
37. Spurl
    
38. Squidoo
    
39. tagtooga
    
40. Tailrank
    
41. Technorati
    
42. unalog
    
43. Wink
    
44. wists
    
45. Yahoo My Web
    
46. zurpy

The test will now be called the iSkills assessment.

Their site says that "iSkills is the new
ICT Literacy Assessment and more than just a new name. The iSkills assessment provides colleges and universities with
new customizable score reports and lower pricing."

We all know ETS for the GRE®, SAT®, and AP® tests.
They are a non-profit with quite a range of products and they also design, develop and implement customized assessment
systems.

The iSkills test uses scenario-based tasks to measure both cognitive and technical skills and is
intended to guide institutional information/communication technology literacy initiatives, guide curricula innovations,
measure progress standings, and assess individual student proficiency. ETS says that educational institutions can
receive test scores in a form that allows them to compare their students' performance with those of students from
similar institutions.

What are they calling "literacy proficiency"?

"It is the
ability "to use digital technology, communication tools and networks appropriately to solve information problems
in
order to function in an information society. This includes the ability to use technology as a tool to research,
organize, evaluate and communicate information, and the possession of a fundamental understanding of the ethical/legal
issues surrounding the access and use of information."

I'm not an expert on the ICT (though
some field testing was done at NJIT & one of our professors here was involved in this assessment), but I wonder if
the change had more to do with the response and field testing of the original version which reportedly showed students
at lower than expected levels.

Is the move to "skills" like the back-to-basics movement that once swept
(like a virus) through the K-12 world?

ETS also supports K-12 education with products like its System 5™ Suite
that combines assessment, data analysis, instructional strategies and professional development tools.

I would
suggest looking at ETS' effective
teaching section and at their research
area. With so many schools involved in assessment programs whether they are imposed by the federal government (

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