Glendale CC's Self-Paced Emerging Tech Tool

I recently discovered a self-paced, collaborative, emerging technology tool developed by one of Maricopa's Colleges: Glendale CC. It's called 23 Things and is similar to ELI's 7 Things. It seems that the tool is a blog that allows faculty members to move through emerging technologies (blogging, photos and images, RSS & Newsreaders, Tagging, Wikis, Online Apps, and Podcasting). It's designed to be completed in 10 weeks (over the summer) and is self-paced--genius!

Interesting how successful short chunks of content are. More manageable and digestible for busy folks.

Also interesting is how this fits in to the School 1.0/School 2.0 concept.

Here is the School 1.0 model, which as Warlick points out, illustrates instructors delivering content and skills and students acting as mirrors, reflecting content and skills back to the teacher.


Warlick says that in School 2.0 teacher’s become learners and learners become teachers, and each side is empowered with conversation, control over their information landscape, and connections with each other — with almost no constraints of hierarchy.

Students stop being mirrors, and instead become amplifiers. Their job is not merely to reflect what they encounter, but to add value to it. Content and skills are no longer the end product, but they become raw materials, with which students learn to work and play and share. Information is captured by the learner, processed, added to, remixed, and then shared back, to be captured by another learner/teacher and reprocessed.

Sound good? Are our learners ready for this heightened role? How can we make them ready?

My First Maricopa Tech Conference

After several months of careful planning, the day of the 20th (whew, talk about pressure) Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference finally arrived. Just about 200 Maricopa faculty came to listen to the over 25 sessions--also put on by Maricopa faculty. We heard an informative and entertaining talk on Net Gen learners from Joel Hartman from UCF--blended learning guru. Over lunch, Cole Camplese from Penn State spoke to us about students' uses of emerging technologies and web 2.0 tools and school 2.0--an interesting concept.

Biggest compliment: "Wow, there are lots of new faces here." We suffer from "serial attenders," the usual suspects (often few) who show up to all things technology. How do we reach out to newbies?

Biggest criticism: "I feel like I needed a glossary to understand all the terminology here, I needed a beginner's conference before coming to this." How do we offer enough "emerging" stuff without leaving behind those that are new and want to sample a few things? And...how can we help faculty navigate through the sea of technology? What could/should guide them?

Overall, this was a great day and a wonderful way to kick off the summer for many faculty members.