Choose your own presentation

Good friend and fantastic presenter, Gary Hartzell, sent me this reference a few weeks ago:

 Lane, Robert (2006).  A Guide to Relational Presentations.  Aspire Communications.  http://www.aspirecommunications.com/   Accessed September 20, 2006.

 (Can you tell by the citation format Dr. Hartzell's been a college professor

Anyway, the concepts in Lane's 16 page booklet are very interesting and hearken back to the days of HyperCard and HyperStudio - multimedia that is structured on something other than the linear organization that PowerPoint begs us to use.

The authors encourage a more free-flowing type of presentation software use with hypertext links (within PowerPoint) that allow those who attend a presentation to help determine its path. And I think I've found a way to test this out.

I'm doing a new presentation today for the Georgia Council of Media Organizations in beautiful Athens called Libraries for the Net Generation. And in preparing it, I found there is simply TOO much information on the topic to fit the standard 50 minute time slot.

So what I've done is create what I call a "Choose Your Own Presentation" format. One slide, below, will link to 5 different areas of Net Gen attributes and the group attending will choose the areas we explore first.

For an old linear thinker/presenter, this goes against the grain, but we'll see what happens.

By the way, there are some tremendous resources on our current crop of learners. Among the things I've been reading in preparation are: 

• Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-19 Year-olds. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005 www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm
• Howe and Strauss, Millenials Rising. Vintage, 2000
• Oblinger and Oblinger, Educating the Net Generation, EDUCAUSE, 2005 www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen
• Pew Internet & American Life Project (various reports) www.pewinternet.org/
• Tech-savvy students stuck in text-dominated schools, education evolving, 2005 www.educationevolving.org/studentvoices/student_opinion_papers.asp

 The Olinger and Olinger work is a great place to start.

The handouts for my presentation with synthesize some of this work and attempt to relate it to school libraries can be found here. How do we as educators respond when kids are radically different in so many ways from us? Or do we try to make them change to fit our systems? I think we will be in a world of hurt even thinking that's possible.

Hope this old dog is up to some new tricks today. 

Dad's Computer Rules

Vicki Davis lists her "11 Steps to Online Parental Supervision of your Children" on her (Cool Cat Teacher Blog, Sept 16, 2006, and Miguel Guhlin riffs on them here. Sensible and sensitive advice.

My list for my (now grown) son which I published in Learning Right From Wrong in the Digital Age.

Dad’s Household Computer Rules

• Do not break the law. I don’t have money for bail or fines.
• Do not invade others’ privacy (and I will respect yours).
• Do not give out ANY personal information about yourself or the family.
• Be truthful about who you say you are in online communications.
• Talk to me if anything about a website concerns or confuses you. I know that bad sites can be accessed accidentally.
• Don’t download and install software without my permission. I mean it.
• Be as smart, skeptical, and cautious online as you are elsewhere.
• Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do if I were watching you. I just might be.

If I were rewriting these today, I would add:

• Watch how much time you spend online. Too much and you'll go blinky and possibly psycho.
  

As of this writing, my son is 1) out of jail, 2) seems to have fairly decent values, and 3) hasn't been abducted by anyone.
 

Embracing you inner confusion

A teacher commented on my e-mail signature quote last week:

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. Wendell Berry

The mention brought to mind an excellent article that appeared in the January 2005 Kappan magazine that I reread on the flight to Denver this weekend. "Embracing Confusion: What Leaders Do When They Don't Know What to Do" by Barry C. Jentz and Jerome T. Murphy.

 The article recommends strategies for leaders who encounter situations which simply catch them off guard, had the "rug pulled out" from under their feet. The authors write that we do NOT want a leader in such situations who:

• instinctively blames circumstances or other people when things go wrong;
• says he is open to input but regards any feedback as criticism and doesn't listen to others;
• hates uncertainty and opts for action even when totally confused; or
• takes a polarized view of leadership in which anything less than take-charge decision making shows abject weakness.

Jentz and Murphy go on to suggest using the 5 step RIA model in "confusing" situations:

1. Embrace your confusion.
2. Assert your need to make sense.
3. Structure the interaction.
4. Listen reflectively and learn.
5. Openly process your effort to make sense.

Most of us who work in technology and education experience confusion on nearly a daily basis. Well, at least I do. In fact I seemed to grow more confused about life in general as years go by.

Yet new challenges, problems, and even confusion certainly keep one's life and job from getting boring.  Thinking about some positive reactions to puzzling situations is healthy for both ourselves and for those with whom we work.

What do you do when you just don't know what to do?