Is It Too Much To Expect Wi-Fi at a Conference in the Year 2009?

Sitting in a local coffee house three blocks from the Baltimore Convention Center.

Reason? Well, hot coffee and free Wi-Fi, of course.

And because only one of those things was offered at the convention center.

***

Had a talk over there with one of the organizers about the failure to provide access during the ed conference today. And she agreed wholeheartedly that there was indeed great irony in the fact that none of us bloggers or Twitterers could connect during the morning presentation on social networks.

I'm not going to throw around blame; a lot goes into the planning and production of any conference and there will be successes and failures along the way. But I am going to ask three questions of both conference organizers and the sites that offer services to them.

First to the organizers:

1. Do you understand why a Wi-Fi connection is not a luxury, but an empowering and enhancing vehicle for driving meaningful discussion at your conference?

2. Do you understand that teachers are now partaking in professional development on a daily and individualized basis via Twitter and online media, and therefore expect to be able to tap into, share, and dialogue with their personal learning networks the worth and value present in your conference rooms?

3. Do you understand that by failing to provide free Wi-Fi to your conference-goers, you are closing off your conference from any meaningful real-time discussion with the broader education community -- a discussion with the potential to dramatically increase the value of your conference for participants and therefore increase their desire to actively take part in future editions?

Now, to the conference site:

1. What are the physical costs associated with opening up your network to your conference goers? From what I noticed, the network at Baltimore's convention center was in place -- in other words, all that was needed was a password. So, is there a real cost to opening access, or are conference goers just expected to pay a gatekeeper fee?

2. Do you understand the value inherent in having your site associated with free access; and do you understand the future implications of being designated as a site opposed to free access?

3. Do you really believe that you are the only game in town? (That was harsh... what I really meant to say was: Do you see it as a smart business plan to bilk your clients out of every last dime?) Or are there real roadblocks to your technological capacity as a site and you are actually not presently equipped to provide authentic access to a 21st century conference-going crowd?

Conferences are changing. People are paying attention to the access and associated value on a site-by-site and conference-by-conference basis. Furthermore, the folks most likely to provide value at a conference are the folks who can bring outside networks into the fold of the discussion.

Conference organizers and conference sites ignore this at their peril.

Review, Reconsider, Reallocate!

A comment came in via the audience during the second panel yesterday afternoon at the Social Tech and Ed conference. The gentleman made the comment that it would be foolish to try to tell our admins and higher-ups that open source is free. Bandwidth, hardware, and connectivity after all are all cost-heavy infrastructure components that have to be in place before a school can even think about open source.

And that’s true. But it’s not the whole story.

The fact of the matter is that schools have all of the money they need to supply classrooms with projectors, students with netbooks, and schools with big bandwidth. It’s all a matter of the allocation of resources.

How much money does your school spend on paper and copiers? How about software licenses? Local servers? Machine contracts? Books? Encyclopediae? Wall mounted maps? Globes? Chalk? Dry-erase markers? Dirt for the ballfields?

Add it up. And then tell me you can’t afford $300 per kid plus a decent wireless system.

Don’t spend good money on crappy operating systems. Don’t spend a dime on office and presentation software. It’s all available in stable and effective formats for free.

Because sometimes ‘free’ is ‘free’.

But that’s not the end of the story. Because there is another resource that we are going out of our way to foolishly neglect: the technology that our students already have.

In our attempts perhaps to try to maintain a ‘level’ playing field, we are in fact cutting off our collective nose to spite our collective face by not allowing students to bring their own laptops, netbooks, and smartphones into class. I spoke with two teachers yesterday -- one from Massachusetts and the other from California -- who both told me that their schools have explicit policies that prohibit students from bringing their own tech to school.

This in spite of the fact that -- at least in the case of the Massachusetts teacher -- an overwhelming number of students had laptops and mobile devices at home.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Why are we forcing students to use the software we’re spending thousands of dollars to license when they could just bring their own machines and work off the Cloud?

I understand that not all students will have the family resources to afford computers or mobile devices. Which is why we’ll use all of that money we saved to get good devices into their hands.

Come on people, let’s think differently about this. Review, Reconsider, Reallocate. We can get this thing done!

Summer Assignment for Teachers

Here's a list of 5 things you can do over the summer to prepare your paperless classroom for the new school year.

1. Start a blog. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. You have something to say. So say it. Say more of it everyday. A blog is the hub around which a paperless classroom rotates. The more comfortable you are at blogging and reading blogs, the more comfortable you will be teaching in a paperless classroom.

2. Start a Diigo account. I've been following the Diigo-ing and Diigo-speak of many folks and finally decided to take the plunge myself. I plan on spending all summer learning everything I can about how to use social bookmarking. And in the fall, I am going to make it a mandatory practice for students in my classes.

3. Tweet, Tweet, Tweet. Forget what everybody has told you about Twitter. Forget everything you've read about it. Hype is hype is hype. Just sign up, follow some ed techies, and enter a new world. It will prove to be a Professional Development experience unlike any other. You will kick yourself for not having signed up earlier.

4. Follow the debates concerning traditional media and social media. As regular readers know, this is something which has very much been on my mind lately. My current thinking is this: the #IranElection feed changed everything. It didn't 'replace' mainstream media, rather it forced a critical eye onto the inherent problems within it. And -- most importantly -- in a way that took popular imagination by storm. Are professional journalists necessary? Absolutely. But are the top-down corporate organizations which provide them with jobs singularly necessary? That's the question that's up in the air. That's a question they are asking in Seattle. And in Boston. And in Chicago. And in Baltimore. What's the future of media? Well, I think the type of synergy we've seen in the last eight days between professional savvy and amateur ingenuity marks the way forward. Because the best thing that that synergy can create is a more engaged citizenry; and the more engaged the citizenry, the higher the quality of the output of social media. We have the opportunity here to organize and educate a more sophisticated and engaged society.

5. Prepare your talking points. There are two major obstacles to starting any paperless movement: blocking and access. The events of the last days, as well as the plethora of examples of Twitter in the classroom that have been popping up across the blogosphere, should aid in bolstering your arguments against the former. As for the latter, it is our duty as educators and citizens to advocate for free universal Wi-Fi and universal mobile hardware in all of our schools and public libraries. Movements in major cities such as Philadelphia and Minneapolis have demonstrated that universal Wi-Fi does not have to be a dream. The dropping of the prices of Netbooks and Smart Phones below the cost of textbooks has mooted the cost argument; now it's just a matter of the allocation of resources and the educating of teachers in how to best use this stuff.

Have a fun, safe, and productive summer. There's plenty to learn between now and the new school year.

More on Access and Connectivity

Reader Ann helping us keep our eye on the ball:

What about the kids who have to sell all they own to buy food? Who can't wander the neighborhood or hike to the library because they work all day or take care of relatives? Some kids have the motivation, but their first allegiance is to the immediate needs of their families. Spending all day at the library or internet cafe is a luxury. The digital divide goes into the root of what we believe about the responsibilities of our society. It isn't just about giving everyone laptops (although I would take that, too!) but looking at quality of life issues. Maslow's hierarchy...we want students to be thoughtful and innovative, lets make sure they have sufficient health care and real living wages...

More on connectivity / access...

A reader writes:

As we are planning on going one-to-one this year, we have discussed this issue as not all of our students have internet access. Students should have the opportunity in class to download the information they need and use the laptops at home for the applications and working with the information. As I am very close to paperless right now and my students cannot yet take their laptops home, sometimes you just need to be really flexible.

Access and Community

Reader Knaus on Snow Days:

Great cartoon. Raises lots of questions though. Do all your students have computer and internet access at home?

We're a 1:1 computing school, so I do have the benefit of knowing that at least all of my students have a computer.

With regard to access, I see this as no different than when I was a kid growing up in Baltimore and our teacher gave us a 'video-project'. My family certainly didn't have a video camera and neither did many of my friends. But, there were always a few kids in each class whose families owned one, and so we'd get together and do projects together. Making the best of what you have goes a long way.

So whether it's everybody going over to Billy's house one afternoon to do a school project online, or whether it's meeting up at the public library to use the Internet, the means are there.

The rest is motivation. And I see, through ongoing and authentic use of the Internet in the classroom, something related to that coming through: more of a sense of community among the members of the class.

And that is why I see blogs as having such potential for great change in education: because they make the students responsible both to themselves and to the community. They put the student in a place where his or her work can be seen by whomever you give access to (including parents, administrators, other students, fellow teachers of the student...) and, more importantly, they create a situation where the community only benefits through the sustained participation of each individual in the class. Motivated by a skillful teacher, the student develops a real sense of responsibility towards their blog. It becomes a public face of their educational experience. It becomes an identity thing.

By and large, I see students willing to step up to this challenge. And they will meet together to overcome individual technological deficiencies. They will rendezvous at the library to sustain their part in this community. They will take responsibility for their work if they believe that it actually means something to the larger community.

Sounds like I'm getting ready to throw down some ideas combining blogging with project-based-learning, doesn't it? (All in due time...)

With regard to their own educations, the sense of personal responsibility and self-direction is what is fundamentally at the heart of a sustained and motivational community. It all feeds itself. It's the best of the 'Net in microcosm. And I'd argue it's the way in which individuals and communities will grow in the 21st century.

Assessments: What to do when you want to limit access

A reader is concerned about being able to give an assessment online but limiting the applications the students are allowed to access for completing the assessment:

Well, for my needs, it means making the assessment tool the only application available to the student. The best scenario, though, would be to have that configurable, so that not only could they have, say a OneNote page to write their responses and Maple or Geogebra to try out their ideas but not have access to previous notes in OneNote nor social-networking, etc. And this has to be dead-easy, one-click on, one-click off kind of configurability on the part of the teacher.

Two ideas: one totally lo-fi and the second an easy-to-use program.

First: "Hands up! Spot check!" The teacher tells the students at the beginning of the assessment that there will be random spot checks. Anyone who has an illegal browser / program open forfeits their grade. Anyone who continues typing forfeits his or her grade. Students just flip their screens around for the teacher to spot check. I use this method all the time and generally after you catch a student the first time, you never have another problem.

Second: SMART sync 2009. This is the new version of SynchronEyes. It gives you one-button control over all student computers. You'll be able to monitor each screen in your room and you'll be able to block and/or control student machines and access. I've used SynchronEyes in a 'language lab' type of setting and it worked just fine. You can even use the program to create simple self-grading reading-checks.

Easy.