FETC - Steve Dembo

Blogging live from FETC - Steve Dembo, from Discovery Educator Network (DEN) talking about the huge amount of information out there - Flattening of the World (The World Is Flat) that creates a level playing field for people to compete and succeed:

1. open sourcing - people collaborating together to create tools that are comparable to stuff that is out there; doing it voluntarily. Open source version might have 1,000 people working on it. Doing it cause they want to, cause they are passionate. Tools are provided free of charge so people will use it.
2. Steroids - the ability to access the Internet anytime, anywhere, more ways than ever to be connected in a big way.

More access to tools than we ever had before. Web 2.0.

1. Wikinommics of learning: mass collaboration has changed everything. Curriki a curriculum project that is a wiki where they are trying to build curriculum that schools can draw upon.
2. Perpetual beta: web 2.0 tools just keep throwing it up there, perpetual newness ongoing. Institut St. Joseph - Canadian school where students blog all the time. Their stuff is always in perpetual beta. They put a stamp on it when it is a final draft.
3. Innovation vs. Invention - a lot of people taking what is out there and mashing them together, putting them together to invent something very cool - they are doing something innnovative with the tools. Example: Google Lit Trips.
   

New Ways to work: Collaborate in real time.

This creates a democratization of knowledge combined with democratization of tools to use that knowledge and create things from it. The average person can be innovative, be published, get credit for it and add it back into the body of knowledge. You don't have to publish in a major journal to have an audience anymore. This all leads to this phenomena of changes in online educational community. The community becomes my network. "MY" implies ownership - publish, comments, reader becomes contributor and collaborator.

• Twitter: going to a community of educators and saying, What do you know? Join us.Spontaneous professional development. People are doing it because they are passionate about education; lifelong learners.

• Classroom 2.0 - you can create own social network. You can reach your niche for your community.

• Second Life - big learning curve, but once you get past it, it has amazing things for educators to get together and explore the tool together--how it could be used in education. People are having fun.

Native way to attend a conference:

• live blogs

• podcast

• backchannel - people in the audience open up a skype chat session to talk about what's going on making connections in real time.

• skypecast

• twitter

• ustream

Sharing what's happening in one place with other people, starting your own node with a web in real time, participate with people who are watching it. You can create multiple communities to fit who you are and make the connections. IF you do nothing else at a conference, continue to collaborate online when you are separate. Keep the learning ongoing. Connecting teachers to their most valuable resource - each other. Your best resource is the other people who do similar things. Nothing more valuable than building your personal learning network.

Thanks, Steve, for a very motivating presentation!