Flexknowlogy

It looks like I’ll be presenting at the 2008 MoodleMoot San Francisco, June 9 - 11, 2008 South San Francisco Conference Center on our Open Mod for sharing open educational resources. I’ll be dragging Kenneth Woodward along to explain the technical facets of the mod, and to delve into the community of Moodle developers.

Of course, prior to the conference Ken and I will have to work pretty aggressively with Clark Nielsen and John Krutsch to ensure that the mod’s features and functionalities are stable and presentable.

Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and I will be presenting our online cheating sessions a couple times this summer, and would like to welcome everyone to attend:

1. The Cheatability Factor at Distance Teaching and Learning 2008, Madison, Wisconsin
2. How to Cheat Online & The Cheatability Factor at Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange 2008, Orem, Utah

Here are some details, reproduced from the proposals:

Promotional Summary

What is your online course’s “cheatability factor”? 75% of students have admitted to cheating during their college career, and according to some studies online assessment makes cheating easier. This session considers technical, philosophical, and environmental factors that may increase or decrease the cheatability of online courses from design to delivery, and presents a rubric used to assess those factors.

Objectives and Description

Presentation objectives:

Participants will..

1. Discover the extent to which cheating-related problems exist in online education and online-based assessments
2. Consider factors that may contribute technologically, philosophically, or environmentally to online cheating
3. Examine a rubric used to measure the “cheatability” of online course
4. Discuss practices and strategies to avoid or minimize the impact of cheating

Presentation description:

Nobody wants students cheating in their online class, yet an estimated 75% of students have admitted to cheating during their college career, and according to some studies online assessment makes cheating easier. The problem is not only one of practical importance for educators, it is one of growing importance to instructional technologists, administrators, and anyone else with a vested interest in the validity and reputation of distance education and technology-enhanced teaching.

This session will first present information and collected research data that summarizes the state of cheating in higher education in general, and in distance education specifically. While a general awareness of the pervasiveness of cheating may be in and of itself an eye-opener to many educators and administrators, the motivations behind cheating and the responsibility teachers have to recognize their own influence on cheating can provide an alternative perspective on what is normally considered a quite simple choice. McClusky’s theory of Power-Load-Margin, for instance, informs teachers of the impact they may have on students’ lives, and the impact students’ lives have on their studies, both of which can lead students to choose to cheat. A number of environmental factors are particularly salient in online courses, such as ambiguity of definitions of cheating, actual or perceptual “distance”, level of instructor-student interaction, individual relevance or meaningfulness of activities and assessments, etc. Additionally, there are a number of more technical and technological factors that can increase or decrease both a student’s propensity to cheat, and his/her ability to cheat.

By considering these technical, methodological, and environmental factors, Distance Education at Utah Valley University has developed a rubric to assess online courses and report on potential factors that may increase or decrease the cheatability of online courses from design to delivery. This rubric is (1) provided to teachers engaging in distance education course development or instruction, (2) made available to administrators and department chairs as an example of our mutual interest in preserving the integrity of online education, and (3) implemented internally as a tool in our course design process to better evaluate and recommend online assessments before, during, and after an online course is delivered.

Because cheating itself is a complex and sensitive issue informed by experience and diverse perspectives, this session seeks to engage participants in a dialogue on cheating, online assessments, and technology. We predict there will be naturally flowing discussion and debate between participants who may favor one approach over another, e.g. a “direct assault” approach which seeks to thwart any and all attempts at cheating using technology or applied strategies, vs. “hearts and minds” pedagogical approaches that focus on course environment, assessment design, and student engagement.

This article is an attempt to objectively define the phrase “creepy treehouse” as coined by Chris Lott, and in current usage by ed tech folks such as Scott Leslie, Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and others. I plan to follow up with a post on my perspective on CTH in the field of educational technology.

creepy treehouse

see also creepy treehouse effect

n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.

Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.

Example: “Blackboard Sync is soooo creepy treehouse.” Marc Hugentobler

In the field of educational technology a creepy treehouse is an institutionally controlled technology/tool that emulates or mimics pre-existing technologies or tools that may already be in use by the learners, or by learners’ peer groups. Though such systems may be seen as innovative or problem-solving to the institution, they may repulse some users who see them as infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups, or as having the potential for institutional violations of their privacy, liberty, ownership, or creativity. Some users may simply object to the influence of the institution.

I’ve been observing this phenomena increasingly, as instructors push down hot Web 2.0 technologies, while students push back with vocal objections or passive resistance. I call this the creepy treehouse effect.

More directly, any move to integrate or aggregate new institutional tools or systems with pre-existing tools or systems already embraced by the community may be seen as creepy treehouse, in as much as it may be construed as institutional infringement upon the social or professional community of it’s participants.

For example, the Blackboard family of learning management system products are often seen as creepy treehouses, as they provide e-learning tools in a very rigid, closed environment that is institutionally controlled in an attempt to “engage” students through technological novelty or mimicry of existing Web-based tools for social engagement. Increasingly, learning management systems are incorporating what educators assess as being potentially valuable learning tools such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, etc., not recognizing that these tools may be seen as artificial, meaningless, tiresome, temporary, or simply another aspect of The Man by the institution’s target participant group: the students.

At the same time, other LMS tools that are more exclusively related to the traditional activity of teaching (e.g. gradebooks, online quizzing, material posting, etc) are not viewed as inherently creepy treehouse. Tyrel Kelsey suggests:

Students reject creepy treehouses for one reason: they are creepy. I think a better approach to education is the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) … which [students] can invite the professor into when they feel comfortable doing so.

In Students should build their own tree house

Creepy treehouses are not limited to the realm of education or educational technology. In the computer software environment, for instance, Microsoft Office Live is likely to be judged as creepy treehouse relative to Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho, not due entirely to it’s competitiveness or the relative similarities of the products, but more to the origination of the software: Microsoft is often seen as a controlling, soulless, self-centered institution, whereas Zoho and Google are seen as not only preceding Microsoft Live, but also open, user-centered, community-driven, or alternative.

Opinions in the community as to the creepy treehouse-ness of a given system or environment may vary greatly due to the subjectiveness of individual experiences. I expect that newly introduced tools, systems, or environments are more likely to be suspect and labeled “creepy treehouse”, though over time such systems may prove to have more salient long-term value to the community than anticipated.

I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles about learning management systems (LMS) and personal learning environments (PLE) as of late. LMSs, once the darling of educational technologists, have been getting a sound thwacking inspired by the recent Blackboard patent lawsuit victory. In almost a stars-aligning continuity, PLEs have been gaining more attention and support as “Web 2.0″ technologies have improved, broadened, and gained in popularity amongst communities. Several aspects of both have risen to the top of my constantly-refilled cup of questioning: LMS as a “walled garden”, PLE as perhaps pedagogically superior but strategically tenuous or immature, and the lack of full debates between the two approaches to technology-enhanced education.

George Siemens blogs up just exactly the news I’m interested in week after week, and on the 28th he posted up a reference to Peter Tittenberger’s short piece The Strength of Garden Walls found on his a touch of frost blog. This article describes the percieved value of institutionally administered learning management systems and social software tools as “walled gardens” for their ability to provide teacher control over user access to learning materials and tools, and the distribution of the participants’ input and output.

(I should restate that, for most institutionally administered social software tools are set up specifically to inhibit or even disallow public access and public viewing, often out of fear of legal repercussions for providing access to students’ personally identifiable information (e.g. in the United States, FERPA in higher education and K-12). For example, LMS’s natively restrict public access, typically don’t allow publishing of student work outside the password-protected site, and authentication access is often provided only through the institution’s student information system. So walled gardens don’t really provide teachers with control, they simply give teachers a box of handcuffs, sans keys.)

My perception is that most of the prominent folks involved in new teaching and educational technology believe that the walled garden approach is “bad”, that LMSs are “bad”, and that open, learner-centered strategies, such as personal learning environments (PLE) are “good” (or at least “better”) because they better reflect or adapt to current Internet-driven trends in networked information and social connectivity. To elaborate:

• Educators who believe in fostering authentic learning experiences have become increasingly disillusioned with the walled garden of the LMS. Increasingly popular “real world” Web-based social software has cast many LMS tools as redundant.

• Many institutionally adopted learning tools, driven by the perceived needs of the institution, directed by non-faculty IT, and limited by the pace of administration, are rarely able to maintain currency with readily available “real world” tools simply because the institution has neither a massive, global audience to demand innovations, nor the breadth of competitive capitalism to fund and incentivize them. Tools provided by education-centric companies such as Blackboard often come in packages, overproduced versions of real-world tools tightly bound to provide a one-stop-shopping experience, and therefore a supposed panacea for all educational technology needs. Few Web application companies would commit such an act hubris–Google has proven itself fairly capable of such a Heraclean act, with competitors Yahoo! and even Microsoft taking tentative stabs of their own.

• Educators personally committed to ideals and philosophies of openness–open source, open access, open publishing–are also frustrated with LMSs and other institutionally controlled software for their innate closed-ness through restriction of access for both contributors and readers.

• And while distinctions between the accuracy of definitions and theories of collective intelligence and connective intelligence are being debated, they share a common recognition that there is significant value in community-involved (influenced?) and socially-invigorated education. Educators who ascribe to such learning theories also find the walled garden approach to be too limiting and lacking provisions for social networking within the institution, let alone the world.

These common postures (I’m abusing that word this week–thanks, Scott) taken against the “walled garden” approach to educational technology are sound, but I do not want to suggest that the LMS is therefore obsolete, for I have presented (and probably insufficiently) only one side of the issue. I daresay there are as many sound arguments the use of walled gardens and even the traditional LMS. And though I have seen Scott Leslie weigh pro’s and cons of “loosely coupled” approaches and even one or two ed tech bloggers recognize the continuing significance of the LMS, I’ve not yet seen a full and complete debate involving people genuinely committed to each of the two sides. (If anyone is game for staging one, my alter-ego would be happy to suppress my doubts completely and take the pro-LMS side–in fact, my ego would probably not let me resign that side to anyone else!)

In my opinion, a really good debate on the subject would illustrate philosophical differences between the two sides, and might even invoke political stances (technology adoption in education [if not pedagogy in general] as “conservative” vs. “progressive”; information access and publishing as an issue of power, definable through capitalist or socialist anarchist ideals, etc).

Even if the outcome of such a debate was largely in favor of an authenticopenconnectedcollective strategy, there are of course still questions about how a PLE is LE really looks and acts like, if it is teachable. Just today on Twitter there were a number of provocative questions about the value of PLE, either as a term or as a “single”, methodological approach.

Add to that the problem that I personally still can not say with total conviction that the LMS is obsolete. Folks like myself have talked up the potential value of PLEs, but broad adoption of the PLE is currently impossible because key technologies and services are still being developed (e.g. good hubs of aggregation [go eduGlu]) or have not yet been widely adopted (e.g. OpenID). Compound that with faculty and administrative anxieties regarding new technologies and teaching approaches, and I can only conclude that the LMS will be around for a long time yet. So until fully viable (every need) and broadly accessible (every application) alternative strategies and methods become available, we might as well openly examine, in good-faith, the value of the LMS, the benefits of walled garden systems, and our reasonings for choosing one or the other.

Desire2Learn announced on February 22nd that Blackboard has won its patent infringement lawsuit against them, stating, “the jury has handed down its verdict that the patent is valid and that Blackboard should be awarded damages of approximately $3 million.”

Blackboard filed the lawsuit on July 26, 2006 against competitor Desire2Learn based on intellectual property claims related to it’s Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138. Blackboard has argued that it had invested 100 million dollars in the development of the educational products protected under the patent. (NoEduPatents.com has made an explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims.)

Backlash to the Blackboard patent by the open source and educational communities has been strong since news of the lawsuit first broke, and will likely continue through communities such as boycottblackboard.org. I personally did not expect Blackboard’s claims would be upheld when re-examined by the patent office, let alone that the lawsuit would be validated by the jury.

Because the patent claims are broad and impact so many common e-learning features, Blackboard’s legal victory is bound to be discouraging and troublesome to other commercial learning management system providers such as Angel Learning, eCollege, and Agilix. Blackboard has previously declared that it would not assert it’s U.S. patents against open source software development, e.g. Moodle and Sakai.

Does this apparent magnanimity bolster my favor for Blackboard? Certainly not; the position is superficial at best, and Blackboard knows it. Anyway, it’s beside the point: though I personally lean towards open source software for educational technology, I am a capitalist, and free market competition and consumer-driven innovation of services and products is important to me. Blackboard’s overblown patent claims are an affront to innovation and competition, taking advantage of systemic failures in U.S. Patent regulations.

And though some will dismiss this news based on the argument that even conceptually the LMS has inherent flaws (failure to keep up with current technologies, inauthentic, lack of learner ownership, creepy-tree-house, etc), I believe the LMS is still a valuable toolset for many. The LMS has has propelled e-learning into a new frontier by standardizing the basic communication and delivery features for an educational audience. The LMS’s ability to provide teachers an easy-to-use set of online educational tools in a one-stop-shopping experience is and will remain considerable for the next 5 years at least. (The unfortunate reality is that alternative networked education “systems” such as personal learning environments are still being thought out and developed–at the very least alternatives are probably not ready for widespread adoption and implementation by faculty members.)

Regardless of whether you’re pro-LMS or anti-LMS in general, I think the larger debate about software patents particularly when applied to education is an issue we in ed tech all have a stake in. At the ITC conference last week I picked up a witty t-shirt given to me by The rSmart Group that signifies the position of many:

Sources

• Desire2Learn’s Patent Lawsuit Blog
• Blackboard’s Patent Info Page
• Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138
• NoEduPatents’s Explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims
• Groklaw: Reexamination of Blackboard Patent
• Wikipedia: Software Patent Debate
• BoycottBlackboard.org

Overview

There’s been a bit of buzz recently on more ed tech blogs than I think I can refer to about using blogs as a delivery host for opencourseware as PLE-inspired learning content. This branches off of that thought by demonstrating a very quick-and-dirty method of targetting chunks of content from various sources in order to remix a customized online “lesson”.

In short, this is a tutorial-in-lieu-of-a-lousy-conference-presentation for those who are unfamiliar with the tools or need orientation to an approach.

Preparation

You’ll need:

1. A Google account set up for Google Notebook and Google Docs & Spreadsheets
2. Mozilla Firefox Web browser with the Google Notebook add-on
3. A collection of topic-related Web pages or documents from which to remix
4. A basic outline of the lesson to be composed/remixed (pref. with objectives)

I expect that this process can also be done with Zoho using the Zoho Notebook Helper add-on for Firefox, however I’ve not worked through this process myself.

The importance of having the last element, an outline of the lesson, should not be underestimated. The hardest part of this task is staying focused and organized. I tend to take a kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything together and sorting it out later, but having a clear outline of what you want your lesson to include from the beginning sets up a checklist of sorts from which you can search and order information.

As for information sources themselves, there are an increasing number of Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials available on the Web that can be remixed into an online lesson. Some of these are materials specifically authored for education (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, UK Open University’s OpenLearn), others are collaboratively authored repositories (e.g. Wikipedia), and some are already in the publich domain (e.g. Project Gutenberg. Of course, copyrighted materials can be quoted and cited within reason, and Google Notebook helps you preserve source information for citations.

Quick Tutorial

Disclaimer: the sources and excerpts used in this example are merely for demonstration purposes and should not be reflective of a well-remixed or structurally complete lesson!

1. First, create a new Google Notebook for the lesson with title.
2. Using your lesson outline, seek out your information sources on the Web. Select a passage and right-click to activate the Firefox Google Notebook Add-on. Choose Note this (Google Notebook). This passage is now an excerpt copied into your Notebook. You’ll notice that the Google Notebook Add-on opens a preview window in the lower-right-hand corner of your screen. You can type your own commentary or notes here to include with the quoted passage.
3. Repeat this for all your information sources on the Web, selecting passages you wish to use as an excerpt in the lesson, right-clicking, and choosing Note this (Google Notebook).
4. Do the same for sources that you may wish to condense, rewrite, summarize, or paraphrase information from. You’ll be able to edit your Notebook in a minute. Because there’s so much information out there, it’s fine to collect more than you need. At the same time, using a lesson outline from the beginning will help you stay focused and not stray from your teaching objectives.
5. Don’t worry about noting sources out-of-order; Google Notebook will let you re-arrange your sources.
6. When you’ve completed your grab of sources, simply click Open Full Page from the Google Notebook add-on. This will open up your Google Notebook with all quotations. Each excerpts is preceded by the title of the Web page from which it came, and a hyperlink to the Web site for citation purposes.
7. You can type directly in the notebook to draft introductions, conclusions, additional information, or segways from one piece of information to another. Again, having a solid lesson outline here is very useful.
8. By mousing-over the left-side of source excerpts, you’ll find that you can left-click and drag excerpts above or below other excerpts or text sections that you’ve written. This makes it easy to rearrange the excerpts to match your lesson outline.
9. Once you’ve finished your rough edit of your lesson, you’ll need to send the saved Notebook to Google Docs for finish editing and publishing to your blog. Under Tools on the top-right, choose Export to Google Docs.
10. While Google Notebook is the best place to perform basic structural edits to your document because of the drag-n-drop feature, Google Docs have slightly more sophisticated formatting features to choose from for your finish edits. After you’ve completed editing and formatting your lesson in Google Docs, click the Publish tab to send this to your blog.
11. In the Publish tab you’ll need to click change your blog site settings and work through the few form fields to point to your own blog for publishing (e.g. blog hosting server, username, password, blog title). Click Test before finishing by clicking OK.
12. An alert will ask you to confirm publishing. Note that after you’ve published, you can in fact make edits to your Google Doc and republish to your blog, overwriting the original blog post using nearly the same process we just did.
13. After publishing, go to your blog and review your re-mixed lesson! Remember, you can edit your Google Doc and republish at any time, however if you want to add to your lesson starting from Google Notebook you are better off deleting the original blog post and Google Doc and re-exporting from step 9. Using the Firefox add in for this process preserves text, images, and hyperlinks from the source all the way to the published blog, however I’ve not had any luck preserving embedded video files.

OK, this creates an admittedly rough looking “lesson”, but it’s a fast method of remixing open content, especially if one has a good outline and is familiar with what’s available.

One idea that I haven’t played with is using Google Desktop with Notebook to grab pieces from files on my local computer. I’ve actually never used Desktop, but it’s been suggested that this would be possible.

This shirt is based on a workshop title suggestion Scott Leslie made (half?) jokingly over a Skype meeting.

I’m considering ordering up a batch of these from UberPrints.com for my crew at DE. PLE is People! That’s all you need to know.

Steve Hargadon posted up reflections on his Classroom 2.0 workshops, and the ideas he has generated are great for generating new ways of showing, sharing, learning, and doing at the 2008 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange.

A couple of ideas for TTIX 2008 specificially:

In addition to the option of Twitter, why not a simple web-based chat room for back channeling? It’s old-fashioned now, but most setups require no user name, and rooms are easily created. Skype is cool too, however.

To that end, we’ll have a presenter-editable web page for each presentation which will host a shoutbox, presentation materials, link to video archive, link to relevant blogs, etc!

We are going to try starting TTIX with a 45-minute pre-conference session for everyone on Twitter and blogging. Just a means of getting people in and familiar with these two powerful social software tools. We’re going to ask for volunteers to each guest review 1 session during the day on our TTIX blog, and so we’ll divvy out users/passes at that time.

More ideas coming soon. Again, I can’t thank Steve enough for his work on Classroom 2.0–even though I haven’t attended this, his passion to making it a better workshop (or an “un-conference”) is inspiring and motivating.

One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is our annual Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, which is now nearing it’s 4th year. While we’ve held it as a pretty traditional (small) ed tech conference during the first three years, John Krutsch and I began TTIX in 2004 with two key objectives:

1. TTIX will always be free - no registration fee (and therefore no conference tote bag, low-capacity usb drive, pen, keychain, etc.)
2. TTIX will emphasize 2-part sessions: part 1 is information, part 2 is hands-on application

We’ve added a few other facets, like
presenters are encouraged to make their materials available under a Creative Commons license, videos of presentations should be available for download after the event,
organized social events can help folks make professional connections
And, this year, conference proposals can be rated by the public almost immediately after submission. Admittedly the 5-star rating system is overly simplistic, but we see this as a great way to (1) advertise the possible sessions, (2) give prospective presenters some preliminary feedback, and (3) give the community a chance to make their interests heard to the proposal review committee. Ultimately we hope to go to a fully community-driven conference proposal review system.

Today I was lucky enough to stumble upon Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s reflections on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference, “On Conferencing”. In this he examined the big questions I always ask myself when I go to conferences: Why do we go? and, Is it worth it? Mr. Levine lays out several complaints and ideas for conferences in general, and this inspired me to think about how we might push TTIX to the next level of meaningfulness and value for our participants. Let me highlight and springboard off of some of Mr Levine’s thoughts (and some of my own) here with respect to TTIX:

1. Online session evaluations. Addition: with immediate results viewable to everyone. With kiosks at the back of the room. Or with “clickers” (as much as I hate ‘em)
2. Learning Circle. Like Cracker Barrels at DT&L in Madison, Wisconsin. I like these a lot, actually, because you get to meet people and talk about related interests, and share experiences. The way I see this working best is someone deemed as expert moderates at small tables, others attend. On cue we all switch tables. I love Mr. Levine’s note that at ELI they used wikis and Google Docs for note-taking; TTIX will have to have this set up in advance for it to work.
3. Post session archives in 24 hours (a/v). We post video archives, but haven’t been able to do it in 24 hours. We probably could if we cut the quality. Addition: make presenter information uploadable during the conference, so presenters can upload their latest slides or materials. On the presentation video and materials download page make participant commentary open, a la a blog. This could be attached to or on the same page as the conference evals for each session! Ooh, but then we couldn’t use a presentation sharing service like Slideshare…
4. Twitter used throughout. ELI had a Twitter account just for the conference, which I definitely want to follow suit with, and many of its participants used Twitter voraciously–I know, I read ‘em! What if we started the first day of TTIX with a Twitter primer/workshop for participants? How to use Twitter, is it good for professional development, is it good for education? I mean, if participants are glued to their laptops for half the conference any way, can’t we encourage them to participate through their laptops? (What other sandboxes can we set up for them?)
5. Do something with the backchannel. No real new ideas here. Chris Lott has suggested “some lamps or orbs which change color and/or intensity according to the back-channel assessment”. Maybe blog up a “best IRC or Twitter quote” per session?
6. Conference blogging. It’s really nice when participants blog up the sessions or even just the conference in general. What if TTIX had it’s own blog that the TTIX committee updated during the conference, or a wiki that everyone could edit on the fly to summarize sessions with. Or, if we aim for something more reflective as Mr. Levine suggests, what if we set up a blog and invited participants to volunteer to author a reflective blog post on one session that they attend? We could have someone in charge of providing those volunteers with an author account on our TTIX blog, and then give them a reward if they post before the conference officially ends.
7. A conference with just keynotes. Last year we ran 4, even 5 sessiosn at a time. Bad move. The sessions were too poorly attended, and we knew some of the sessions were not cream of the crop in the first place. We took notice for 2008 and are trying to limit ourselves to just 3 at a time. But John attended one conference last year that was only keynotes. He loved it. I personally like the variety of being able to choose. But we need to emphasize differentness next year. We need to continue to pushe for, focus on, and applaud the second-day sessions, which is our twist of lime on ed tech conferences. What if we ask 2-day presenters to create an assignment day 1?
8. More hands-on. This is my own suggestion/complaint. Perhaps instead of a conference entirely of keynotes we composed a conference entirely of mini-workshops. That’s the idea behind the 2-part session, after all, but taken to the extreme. Or maybe the regular sessions are all workshops framed in by keynotes (2 per day)? Or a keynote and a learning circle/cracker barrel?
9. More Something Else. At DT&L and many other conferences you have the choice of going to an info session, a panel session, a poster session, etc–all of which are running at the same time. Now I cling to the idea of variety (I’m a session-jumper, remember?), but what if we did 3 sessions at a time, but had an info session hour, a panel session hour, a poster session hour, a workshop hour, etc to force the variety into the day?

These ideas have revved me up. I’m convinced we need to “stir up the stew” as Mr. Levine puts it. The next question is: If TTIX were to implement any 2 of these, which two would you find most valuable? Which would make the conference-going experience more important, more memorable, more applicable to your professional life when you return home?