For a while now, I’ve been using my blog as a learning space to reflect on professional development… and after BLC08 there still seems to be a lot to talk and think about. But there is a problem: My brain is full.

Here are some brief ‘take-aways’ to jot down before things spill out and away.

1. Never do 3 different presentations at one conference. At the very least repeat one of them. Enough said.

2. Online networks develop meaningful friendships. I’m blown away by the immediate connection I made with so many people in my Twitter network.

3. Face-to-face meetings with your network are powerful… very powerful.

4. More learning happens in the halways and at meals/socials than in sessions. Create opportunities for Learning  Conversations.

5. Sessions influence us, and sometimes anger us, but it is our opinions and attempts to make sense of things that matter.

6. As we reflect and question why we do things, we continue the learning.

7. We don’t need to be there to learn.

8. Ewan made it clear that if we create meaningful spaces for teachers to connect, and if we make those spaces useful to teachers, they will connect in new and meaningful ways. In my opinion, usefulness comes out of purpose and design… two things we need to work on.

9. We need to connect with others to meaningfully learn. COLLABORATION time is essential for learners of all ages.

10. Don’t say more than you need to just to fill the space.

Bill C-61 is a copyright law that is truly scary to anyone that shares what they teach online.

The following is an e-mail I received from Kris at http://wanderingink.net She is 16 years old. Bold font is mine, for those that only want to skim…

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Fair Copyright Montreal (a branch of the same group I participate in) posted a full analysis of Bill C-61, the proposed Canadian DMCA.  But don’t click on the link yet, I want to highlight something first.  Read the link afterwards and shake your head at how much these people are stuck in the 20th century.

The bill has a special section for “Lessons”, new copyright laws that apply to the classroom.  Are they exemptions?  Special permissions?  NO.  I personally read the text of the bill that applies (section 30) and decided that Fair Copy Montreal had the best summary, which I’ve posted below.

Here they are, the new copyright laws for education in Canada.  Read all of it.  Emphasis is mine.  Note: when they mention students, it’s impossible to claim “everyone is a student” as a loophole.  In fact, they supplied their own greviously outdated definition in the text of the bill: “a student who is enrolled in a course of which the lesson forms a part is deemed to be a person on the premises of the educational institution when the student participates in or receives the lesson by means of communication by telecommunication.”

Read the following new laws with that exclusive definition of “student” in your mind:

What educational institutions are allowed to do:
Broadcast lessons if the broadcast recipients are exclusively students (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 3)
What educational institutions are not allowed to do:
Print more than one copy of any digital reproduction communicated in a lesson (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 2)
Use a work from the Internet if the website or the work has any form of technical restriction (Clause 18, section 30.04, subsection 3)
What educational institutions must do:
Destroy lessons 30 days after the final course evaluations have been given out (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph a)
Take measures to ensure that students exclusively may receive lessons (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph b)
Take measures to ensure that students may not copy lessons (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph c)
Take measures to ensure that any digital reproduction cannot be communicated to anyone else outside the institution (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph b)
Take measures to ensure that any digital reproduction cannot be printed more than once per person that has received the lesson (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph c)
Take any measure prescribed by regulations for any copied digital reproduction (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph d)

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Can you see what a huge STEP BACKWARDS this is for 21st century education in Canada?  It makes everything that you do illegal.  Confining “copyrighted” learning to people who are on the physical premises… what a 20th century idea!  I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with this unless they at least make an exception for distance education, but even then, this bill is so counter-productive!

Think about those universities like MIT and Berkeley that broadcast their lessons for free over iTunes or their own websites to whoever just wants to learn.  That is exactly what is going to become illegal, at least in Canada.  How are Canadian universities going to be able to compete for students in a global market if they can’t let anyone on the outside take a look in?  Canada is going to lag behind if our government can’t adapt its laws for the 21st century.

They’re going to be voting on the bill THIS September when Parliament is back in session.  The NDP is on our side, but the Liberals are so far uncertain.  The Conservatives are a lost cause – they’re all going to be voting YES on this as a party (because it’s a bill introduced by the Government).  The Bloc Quebecois will probably be voting with the Conservatives.  The bill could go either way depending on how much pressure there is from the public.

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you a portion of my concern over this new copyright bill. Read the rest of the analysis if you like and find the other reasons to be concerned, but I thought I would bring this one to your attention because it strikes so close to home.

If you think this is appropriate reason to be concerned and if it’s not too much to ask, do you think you could forward this email to other web 2.0 educators or anyone else in Canada that would be interested?  I want to raise as much awareness as possible about this new bill among the people it would effect.  If you’d like more information then let me know and I can give you some more links or explain it to you myself.

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Thanks for sharing Kris! Please share this information with anyone you think might care, or contribute to preventing this Bill from stiffling education in Canada!

Brian Lamb adds more about this here: Bill C-61 locks us into a closed education model.

Also, you might want to keep an eye out for Michael Geist’s blog until this is settled. Here is his Bill 61 tag for all his posts on the issue.

This presentation has two parts:

1. Where do our learning conversations need to go? Here are three guiding principles to help us find our way:
• Not the Knowing, but the Process of Inquiry.
• Not covering the curriculum, but ‘uncovering’ the curriculum.
• A focus in innovation, creativity and design.
How do we model this… every day?

Here is a VoiceThread with questions from the presentation… please share your thoughts!

Here is the video Famous Failures that I couldn’t get the sound to play for.

The second part is only shared here… not within the presentation.

2. It is the questions we ask ourselves and our students that help make Project 2.0h’s great. This take-it-with-you powerpoint presentation will help you provide the scaffolding for engaging digital projects.

| View | Upload your own

Thanks to everyone who came to this presentation!

Everyone is welcome to comment on the VoiceThread, or this post!

Description: Since keeping a blog I have learned that little lessons can form big ideas, altering what a teacher can and must do. I’ve recently moved my blog, and in doing so, I have reflected on every post along the way. Here is an anecdotal look at a few things my blog has taught me.

Here is the second part of the presentation where I ask participants to join in on the journey or the conversation…

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Thanks for being part of my presentation… answers to your one question, thoughts, feedback, and comments are all welcome. If you blog a response, please add a comment with a link below.

“Leading the Transition”

I’m in the session now… WOW… so I’ll be brief.

Alan asked me to start a Shared Google Document here it is: http://fon.gs/blc08precongdoc/

And here is the Ustream: http://fon.gs/blc08preconustream/

Here is what it looks like from my perspective: (I pulled out my tablet which is on my lap to do this post)

Special thanks to my new friend Lorraine, who put the camera on her computer, and took care of the camera operation… tough job as Alan moves around a lot!

Hope you enjoy the Ustream!

As a fun aside: photo of the desk in my hotel room after Dave and I arrived and started recharging things:

How much is too much?

I like to lurk in Twitter, but I’m having full-on conversations with Plurk. I just spent over an hour putting my Firefox tabs into diigo. After that I started cleaning up my desktop and found a screen capture I made on twirl over a month ago:

I also bookmarked this Liz Davis post because I could easily have written this introduction… and in fact have done so several times in my head:

I continue to be amazed by the affect that blogging has on my thinking. Everything I do and see and experience is filed away as a potential blog post. I make meaning of my world in ways I never did before. I am constantly composing posts in my head. It makes for some incredible learning experiences, but can also make it hard to sleep.

So as my three presentations for Alan November’s BLC08 approach, and I’m hours-and-hours away from being done, I feel overwhelmed and overloaded.

And so, I’m going to be unplugged from my microblogs (Twitter and Plurk) as well as this blog for a few days. I’m going to bookmark some tabs on my Tablet PC then shut down there too.

It isn’t something I want to do, but rather something I have to do. The problem is that these tools are great for learning and communicating, but they consume too much time. An hour of work turns out to be 15min. of work and 45 min. of reading, reacting, conversing and otherwise being engagingly sidetracked.

I’ll surface in a few days, probably starving for the interaction, but for now it is all too much and I have a few presentations that I want to make meaningful and powerful to what will probably be a very diverse audience.

So, L8R, TTFN, and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.

I missed out on NECC both physically and online. Despite my wonderful network, with @derrallg Ustreaming, and @durff plurking live links, I just could not find the time. I’ve read a few blog posts about NECC, but one has caught my attention. Ewan McIntosh is (Not) coping with cognitive overload:

I feel like the glass that’s got water gushing into it from the tap – despite all that water this particular glass is always going to be half empty when the tap eventually turns off. Most of the input will have fallen off down the drain.

I’m feeling that too. It’s past 3am and I’m up writing a post. I am also ‘working’ on my presentations for Alan November’s Building Learning Communities – BLC08. I’ve had some great help with these presentations recently, but I am requesting a little perspective…

Here are the presentation descriptions:

This, my blog has taught me!

Since keeping a blog I have learned that little lessons can form big ideas, altering what a teacher can and must do. I’ve recently moved my blog, and in doing so, I have reflected on every post along the way. Here is an anecdotal look at a few things my blog has taught me:

• I’m a square peg in a round hole. I’m also Batman, not Borg.
• Digital learning environments create diverse thinking opportunities.
• Learning from reflection is more than surface deep.
• Networks do what classrooms cannot.
• I teach, therefore I blog…

Learning Conversations

Guiding principles and guiding questions. This presentation has two distinct sections, the philosophical and the practical, or simply, the thinking and the doing.

1. Where do our learning conversations need to go? Here are three guiding principles to help us find our way:
• Not the Knowing, but the Process of Inquiry.
• Not covering the curriculum, but ‘uncovering’ the curriculum.
• A focus in innovation, creativity and design.
How do we model this… every day?

2. It is the questions we ask ourselves and our students that help make Project 2.0h’s great. This take-it-with-you powerpoint presentation will help you provide the scaffolding for engaging digital projects.

“I can do that without technology”- Actually, no you can’t!

There are great teachers who engage and teach students ‘without technology’, but that does not justify the avoidance of technology in the classroom. This lighthearted presentation is subtitled ‘The Rant, I Can’t, The Elephant and the Ant’. It explores arguments to support the need for networked teachers.
• The Rant: Things are moving much to fast to keep up!
• I Can’t: Every student (and teacher) already uses technology- get used to it!
• The Elephant: No students aren’t ‘Natives’ but they are digitally exposed.
• The Ant: Networks both teach and engage students.
The presentation ends with the video premiere of ‘It’s a Brave New World-Wide-Web’.

So, with ‘overload’ on my brain… I will look outward for advice. I think that I’m trying to do too much in each of these 1-hour presentations. So please take a look at the descriptions and be so kind as to offer some early input/feedback.

What do you see in the presentations that you like? What could you do without? What do I need to focus on? What’s missing?

Which one would you most likely go to? Least likely? Why?

What other suggestions do you have?