Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Day 2, SXSWedu

9a session: EduBrawl!: Mobile, Flipped, Games

Full disclosure: I attended this session B.C. (before coffee). A panel of K12 educators sharing a range of reactions to the current troika of hot edtech ideas. (Yes, I know. They're not new, in any meaningful sense; they're just hot in the mainstream.) The bulk of the attention went to devices in the classroom: school districts struggling with BYOD, classroom teachers facing expectations to use tablets/apps without any training, finding and curating high-quality media resources. Interestingly, represented on the panel was the anti-tech p.o.v.: a teacher from a school which eschews technology in the classroom. At a conference where the enthymemetic assumption is pro-edtech, was including this fellow an attempt to keep a healthy caution in the too-often celebratory edtech conversation - or a fig leaf?

The flipped class model came in a close second, with the panel fielding questions about methodology and implementation. As someone in higher ed, it was really important for me to see where a lot of the K12 community are on these issues: I saw a great deal of enthusiasm for the possibilities; just as much pragmatic/grudging concern over administrative constraints; and a fair amount of fear and trembling over the fact that many teachers simply never get the support they need to learn how to use tech - let alone use it effectively as a tool to teach!

2p session: An InBloom Day in the Life: Data Flow

Ah, analytics. InBloom, one of the major sponsors of this year's SXSWedu, has developed a framework designed to extract data from across multiple institutional systems/databases, in order to generate useful analytics easily - rather than the tedious, often manual, data crunching that is the hidden but necessary task when dealing with SIS, LMS, etc. In high relief here: the capitalist tendencies toward maximization (and, of course, monetization) of individuals' data - I stayed for an hour, and no one mentioned, let alone addressed, issues of privacy or individuals' control of their own data. Maybe they did eventually - but I left early, largely because I wanted to get to...

3p session: MOOCs: Hype or Hope?

Alas, MOOCs being the flavor of the week, the room was SRO by the time I got there, and event staff were strictly managing ingress/egress. I was ultimately not able to get in to this one. So, instead, I dropped in on...

3p session: Not Another Zombie Idea: Customizable, Open Digital Content Transforming Learning

Single-speaker session highlighting the fact that many school systems' assumptions about the value of "big publisher" content rest on myths. When it comes right down to it, OER (open educational resources, for the non-jargoned among us) is already a high-quality source on par with traditional texts - and of course, is far and away superior to traditional sources in multiple other respects:

  • cost (of course: a perennial concern for public schools)
  • customizability (no copyright concerns - imagine!)
  • cross-platform access (no proprietary file formats, thank you very much)

Two speakers, one focus. At a time when 22 states have introduced measures which give schools flexibility to spend dollars on print textbooks or on tech media resources; and when even assessment is moving into an online format; the time seems perfectly ripe for being smart about the change. How? Rather than dropping the same tired methods into the shiny new chassis of tech, consider the ramifications if, for example, a school district were to use CC BY materials and texts (from a source like CK-12, f'rinstance), and tweak them however necessary to make them perfectly fitted to the district and aligned with the standards. Textbook costs plummet; students immediately have access to materials in a plethora of media/platforms, including text; the district has 100% control over exactly how the texts/resources look, and what they contain.

Anyway, taking a break now; I'll be heading back to the conference for a 5:30p meet-up session on the topic of ePortfolios. After that...who knows? Yet another awesome vegan eatery? That's what I'm thinkin'.

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