The Eddies

Nominations for your favorite blogs close on Tuesday, December 8. Be sure to read about the two step process of nominating:

1. Write a blog post with links to The Edublog Awards Homepage and the sites/blogs you nominate.
2. Use the form on the Edublog Awards homepage to send the link to your blog post.
   

Voting ends Wednesday, December 16.

Awards announced Friday, December 18.

Here are my nominations in a few of the categories:

Best individual blog: apophenia by danah boyd

Best individual tweeter: @ShellTerrell (Shelly A. Terrell)

Best group blog: School Library Journal's Battle of the Kids Books

Best resource sharing blog: Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne

Most influential blog post: Things That Keep Us Up at Night by Joyce Valenza & Doug Johnson

Most influential series of tweets and/or Best educational use of a social networking service: #edchat on Twitter by Shelly Terrell, Tom Whitby, Steven Anderson, and Jerry Swiatek, who archives the Twitter #edchat discussions.

Best librarian blog: Not So Distant Future by Carolyn Foote

Best educational wiki: Springfield Township Virtual Library by Joyce Valenza


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K12 Online Conference 2009

It's almost here!!! The K12Online Conference 2009.

THE DATES of the 2009 K-12 Online Conference: For the past three years, K12Online has taken place in late October. This year, the conference will be held the second and third weeks of December, just prior to the holidays. Week one will be December 7 – 11, 2009, and week two will be December 14 – 18, 2009.

THEME & STRANDS for 2009: This year's theme is “Bridging the Divide” and the four strands, two each week, will be "Getting Started", "Week in the Classroom", "Kicking It Up a Notch", and "Leading the Change". New this year will be “LAN Party” live events on the Saturday following each week of the regular conference in partnership with EdTechTalk.

During the FIRST WEEK Joyce Valenza will keynote the "Getting Started" strand with presentations that will focus on specific, free tools for newcomers. Konrad Glogowski will keynote the "Leading the Change" strand, which will both showcase successful strategies as well as amplify critical issues which must be addressed for innovative learning methods to be adopted by teachers, librarians, and administrators on a more widespread basis.

The "Week in the Classroom" strand during the SECOND WEEK will be keynoted by Rachel Boyd with presentations that will explore how teachers and students are tangibly bridging divides between instructors, learners, classrooms, content, and experts outside the traditional classroom. Diego Leal will keynote the "Kicking it Up a Notch" strand with presentations that will explore innovative ways Web 2.0 tools can be blended together to help students create, collaborate, and share the knowledge safely on the global stage of the Internet. (I was totally surprised to find out that I have been following Mr. Leal on Twitter where he is known as @qadmon.)

There will be 50+ presentations, not counting the keynotes. And, every single one will be available 24/7 as soon as each is published. They will be shared online in a downloadable format and released simultaneously via the conference blog, the conference Twitter account, and the conference audio and video podcast channels.

You can participate in the PRECONFERENCE keynote by Kim Cofino. Find out more here.

K12 Online 2009 will be a great way to begin your professional development. So don't miss out.

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NECC 2009 Is Over, But Still Lives On

I'm finally through perusing the NECC 2009 schedule to increase my personal learning. If you have some time on your hands, I'd recommend that you glance through the schedule and see what catches your eye. There's a wealth of possible content available from digital storytelling, Moodle, blogs, wikis, SmartBoards, digital portfolios, podcasting, GoogleEarth, cell phones, and on and on.

Or find a session that was recorded. Though, not every session has a video, sometimes there's a url available with valuable resources or you can identify an expert that you can follow on Twitter and/or add a blog to your RSS reader.

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Beating the No U-Turn Syndrome

Doug Johnson gave this presentation, Beating the No U-Turn Syndrome: New Approaches to Copyright Compliance at NECC 2009. Yep, I'm still working my way through NECC's schedule viewing/listening/learning.

Mr. Johnson says that we will end up being confused at a higher level. What he really did was get me to think about copyright, fair use and becoming more consumer oriented. The statement below from his presentation wiki summarizes his purpose better than I can.

Too long librarians have been seen as “copyright cops,” impeding the use of copyrighted materials by students and staff. This presentation suggests we redefine our roles, helping those we serve take maximum advantage of fair use provisions, finding authorities with a “user-centric” view of copyright enforcement, and teaching others to consider not just the legal, but moral side of intellectual property acquisition, use and re-use.

Our focus should be turned around to what can be done, not what can't be done. Don't be afraid to use fair use. He reminds us that guidelines are only "safe-harbor" limits. You don't infringe by using copyrighted materials in teaching, researching, criticizing, or news reporting. The transformative nature of parody, commentary, quoting to trigger discussion, illustrate, or provide examples are not infringement. Making use of multimedia for personal portfolios, class work, or conference presentations are not infringement.

We should push the limits and question authority. Make use of the u-turn assumption that it can be done unless otherwise posted. And think about the "blue laws" of copyright. Blue laws are those laws still on the books, however, they are not enforced because they are so old and obsolete, or they are so violated that they should be taken off the books. Mr. Johnson gives a great list in his presentation and asks us whether or not these uses are something that we want to fight for?

An educator's job is to create thinkers. Let the administrators enforce the laws. Educators should become copyright counselors. "You can't give morals and ethics to others, you can only get others to talk which allows them to clarify their own ethics." And don't become a format bigot.

We should encourage the use of:

• public domain, copyright friendly, and royalty-free resources.
• creative commons as a consumer and as a producer so that we can emphathize with creators.
• discussion to reach an ethical level of comfort when using, creating, and re-mixing content.

The presentation is worth an hour of your time with practical tips to make your job easier. You might want to have the wiki open at the same time you are viewing and listening to the presentation. I found some of the presentation slides on the wiki and was able to read them more easily than those seen on the ISTEVision video presentation.

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Library of Congress Online: A Navigation Guide for Educators

This NECC 2009 session was presented by Gail Petri , a former school library media specialist, now an Educational Resources Specialist at the Library of Congress with Judith Graves, a former ESL teacher, now Digital Projects Coordinator at the Library of Congress. Here's the summary below:

Bring history alive for your students! Learn strategies and quick tips for accessing more than 13 million primary source treasures and teaching resources at http://www.loc.gov/.

What an absolutely amazing wealth of resources: books, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, sheet music, sound sheets, photos, prints, sound recordings, and other printed texts. Current and archived exhibitions, American Memory, World Digital Library, Veterans History, and legislative information through Thomas are the LOC's major sections. There are multiple ways to search for information, i.e. browse by topic, collection, time period, geographic location, or media type, as well as search terms. Ms. Petri recommended browsing rather than using search terms. The terminology and subject headings can be very specific so browsing helps you drill down in a search more easily.

Ms Petri and Ms Graves guided us through the various sections and areas on the homepage. I would highly recommend listening to the video recording and following along with the powerpoint presentation slides located here. Ms Petri has saved this presentation (GailLOCNavigating.ppt) and a couple others at drop.io , a free site that can be used to share documents online. The powerpoints can be downloaded and used for your own presentations.

Along with the general resources are specially grouped resources for specific groups, i.e. Kids and Families, Teachers, Librarians, and others. Tools are available that teachers can use to learn how to integrate primary documents into lessons. Primary Resource Sets and Collection Connections are just two of the specially grouped resources that are very useful for teachers. A brand new build-it-yourself professional-development tool for teachers called TPS Direct was released during NECC 2009. Read more about it and the Teacher portal here.

There are webcasts, podcasts also available via iTunes U, a blog, and RSS . The Library of Congress can also be found on the Web via Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.

There are so many, many resources it's almost overwhelming. This presentation helps you get a grasp on how to use the Library of Congress. I also found this tips handout.pdf about the Library of Congress. It's very handy to help you locate resources and includes the urls.

A few resources I especially liked are:

• Today in History, historic facts highlighted by items from the American Memory collections.


• Places in the News, headline locations from LOC's map collections, and


• Portals to the World, selective links providing authoritative, in-depth information about nations.

What do you find useful at the Library of Congress?
My next step is to check out TPS Direct, the build-it-yourself professional development.
Both photos have Creative Commons license's. The plaque was taken byJonathon Colman and the photo above was taken by Michael Kuroda.


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