Reflection on Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman’s Keynote on “More Than Cool Tools” (K12Online07)

Reflection on Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman’s Keynote on “More Than Cool Tools” (K12Online07)

This is an amazing —and very intense— presentation. On the supporting wiki, the authors do admit that they are “guilty as charged for presenting [tools] to teachers via the firehose effect.” This is perhaps not as extreme as that, but I wouldn’t share this with your “newbie” teachers. Their heads might explode.

This is one that will need multiple viewing and has pointed me in directions for further exploration. I found some great resources involving APIs and Mashups (namely, www.programmableweb.com).

Levine, Lamb, and Norman break the presentation down into major categories, focusing mostly on Collaboration, Open Content, Liberation, and ultimately, Disruption. Tools such as RSS, Flickr, Google, etc. are the usual suspects, but presented in the next level of use. We see the power of embedding content within one’s own site rather than staying “chained” to the company’s main site. This is indeed a major shift in business models, where people are being allowed to “take it with you.”

The power of the “Mashup” shows how we are all able to become “prosumers”, where we can take different tools and create our own uses for them. This, I believe is a very important skill to teach children, and I realize I need to expose students to more examples of mashups.

One thing that I really appreciated from the presentation was Brian’s “conversation” with a colleague regarding the adoption of using Google Docs. I plan to actually share this with colleagues as a way to begin dialogue regarding our hesitancy to adopt changes (new tools) because it illustrates both sides of the argument well. It helps me remember that as these changes are being introduced, a clear reason for doing so must be shared and it helps to have options and varying levels of adoption. Google Docs is a great example of this because people could continue to use Microsoft Word, assured that it is compatible with Google Docs. Knowing they have the option to use either one may help them relax enough to at least be open to hearing why Google Docs might be a better method (i.e., collaboration, free, accessible, etc.).

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