Physics Lectures

I had seen these physics lectures before, but I was reminded via Stephen Downes and the NY Times article about professor Lewin's lectures and was telling someone about them just the other day. Thought I should definitely point you to them. I personally am compelled by watching something like Planet Earth. Professor Lewin has managed to create something akin to that experience on a topic that can be made extremely boring by most professors.

You can find his lectures on: ocw.mit.edu, including electrostatics, mechanics, vibrations and waves. If you can't sit still for a whole lecture, then you can find a few of them on YouTube - see form of a battery.

Now I'm curious if it wouldn't be better to have students watch these and then go have a discussion with their physics professor after. Or why have them take physics at their local university at all.

Facebook Enterprise Application

If you've not seen this, there's a Facebook application by Worklight called Workbook that represents an overlay to turn Facebook into an Enterprise Social Network application. This is something I've been expecting for a while based on some conversations with large organizations who planned to use Facebook as their social network.

WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news. Employees can freely use Facebook, with the WorkBook overlay, with no danger of information leaking outside the organization or access being granted to unauthorized personnel.

New Feature in Webinar Tool

Maybe I've not been paying attention, but in the webinar that I just finished, the tool GoToMeeting had a neat feature that showed the percentages of people who were paying attention (had the meeting visual in the foreground) vs. those who were not paying attention. These were shown in percentages - easy to see and understand. There was also a display of those in attendance vs. those who had left. Both of these were great pieces of information.

I'm going to want them in my virtual meeting / classroom tools going forward.

Also - know that the organizer/presenter can now tell if you have their visuals front and center!

Small Group Breakout Sessions at Conferences

There's a great discussion in the comments on my post around small group discussions at conferences. I've updated the original post a bit and would welcome additional thoughts over the next two days in order to help me figure out what I'm going to do in my session at ASTD TechKnowledge.

Tengo Que Practicar

Recently, my distinguished Alumni organization, UC Berkeley, called me for a donation to the School of Education. They are clever in their money-asking ways too. The girl announced that she was majoring in Education to be an English teacher, and as an Alumni, do I have any advice for her. Oooh. I got suckered right into that one. I love giving advice! She seemed shocked when I said she should learn Spanish if she wanted to work in California schools.*

If I could go back into time, I really would have double-majored in Spanish. Working in California schools, it really is a necessity. I have taken summer courses to practice and bought basically every “Spanish for Educators” product there is.** I speak conversational Spanish. And by “conversational Spanish” I mean I can understand what people are saying about 80% of the time, can respond and somewhat get my point across, can fumble my way through an IEP meeting, and know a slew of middle-school pejoratives.

I am a closet Spanish speaker too. I don’t tell anyone for fear they will make me speak. I only use it to spring upon unsuspecting middle schoolers who think I don’t know what they’re saying. I really need to be more brave and try to use it, even if it’s not pretty.

The one thing I can say about being a closet Spanish speaker is that I have tremendous empathy for second language learners. I can understand the “silent period” in which you don’t want to try using the second language (Is that period supposed to last 5 years? Probably not). I can understand how frustrating it is to know what you want to say and not be able to say it correctly. And I understand how it can be confusing to disentangle whether or not a student has a learning disability or is learning English. I certainly had my moments in Spanish school in Costa Rica where I felt learning disabled. And I can understand why a student would have conversational skills but not be able to do academic work. (Any beginning Spanish students here know the words for Homeostasis? How about for Mitosis?) My point is that there is a big difference between chatting with someone and knowing specific vocabulary for academics or explaining disabilities. The vocabulary involved in special education is difficult enough to explain in English.

I guess I'll just make a New Years Resolution: Practice expressive Spanish skills, no matter how malo it sounds.

Oh, and give back to alma matter.

*Because UC Berkeley is full of overachievers, she said, “Well, I already speak 5 languages, but I guess I could add Spanish too!” I felt mono-linguistically inferior.

**This one series was kind of prejudiced. One of the first phrases to learn was, “Carlos está suspendido!” (Carlos is suspended). Why couldn’t Carlos está en el cuadro de honor (Carlos is on the honor roll)?

Note Taking Help

I'm doing some web research (actually I'm constantly doing web research) and I consistently find myself:

1. Finding an interesting page
2. Copying and Pasting Content from the Page
3. Creating a small citation to the page
4. Editing my thoughts

This is part of creating blog posts or part of doing research.

I've looked at various tools to use as part of this, but I'm finding that what I really want is a better Copy-to-Clipboard function (in Firefox) that would include a citation to the original source as part of the copy operation. In other words, it would combine steps 2 & 3.

Any suggestions on that?

Also, I've been evaluating various clipping, note taking tools such as Zotero, Clipmarks, Google Notebook and my frank opinion is that it forces me to use an interface that is limited as compared to putting it into a large document to play with. Any thoughts on this?

Conference Session Breakout

Update: 12/19/2007. There has been great discussion in the comments. I wanted to provide a bit more context for this.

The session will be workforce learning professionals (an ASTD audience). They will range greatly in terms of the kinds of organizations, their experience.

I'm trying to get them to think about the question "How might you use Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Collaboration Tools in your organization?"

I have a list of about 30 ideas, but I think it's useful to think about your organization, your specific context and come up with ideas for where these things might apply. I was planning to do this in small groups and then have them come back together in the larger group. But what I'm hearing is that this is not a good choice...

Original post ... Uh oh, I just saw a post by Donald Clark slamming the use of small group breakouts during conference sessions.

It’s a tired old fossil of a format.

The topic for discussion is usually some ill-defined, banal question, so the group spend a further ten minutes clarifying what’s expected. The time left is usually far too short to get anything meaningfully debated and agreed. Even then it’s often a random selection of thoughts, rants and personal beefs.

Feedback to the group consists of a series of disjointed thoughts, often weighted towards the thoughts of the facilitator. These are scribbled up on acres of flipchart pages blue-tacked on the wall, thereby ruining the décor of the room. The problem here is that this is hardly ever distilled into any sensible points for action.

You’re generally left feeling short-changed.

Uh oh ...

I was pulling together my slides for ASTD TechKnowledge and had planned to do a small group breakout and then have each group contribute to the larger group. This is not something I normally do. And I've certainly had some of the experiences that Donald describes. Now I'm worried.

Do I still do the breakout? Or is Donald pretty much right on track?

My slides are due Friday, Dec. 21.