Keynote Comments from Madison DistEd

The Distance Teaching and Learning annual conference at Madison Wisconsin provided yet another great experience, although getting there proved to be difficult. Tropical Storm Edouardo ripped through Houston the same day I was to fly to Madison. Continental cancelled all flights into and out of Houston for that day. However a quick call to Continental reservations and adjustments in hotel and car rental reservations took care of everything.

The first post is on the keynotes. I'll attempt to place my disorganized pile of notes into a a partially coherent semblance of order for the highlights:

Opening keynote speaker Curtis Bonk provided a great start to the day. He spoke of the ways for spreading the word by way of technology. He mentioned a number of resources including:

• scribd.com for publishing your own papers and materials
• ustream.tv for live streaming your own video and audio
• epals.com for collaborating with other classrooms across the world
• cnx.org and curriki.com for the sharing of educational materials
• teachertube.com is the youtube.com of the education set
• gng.org is the Global Nomads Groups that creates global educational programs
• englishpod.com, spanishpod.com, italianpod.com (and probably others) for language learning through podcasts
• librarything.com for sharing your personal library collection with others. You become a thingamabrarian! Amazing site.
• dotSUB.com allows subtitling of videos on the Web
• montereyinstitute.org/nroc/ is the National Repository of Online Courses available at no charge to both students and educators
  

He also referred to several print resources including Learning at the Back Door (Wedemyer, 1981), Minds on Fire (Brown and Adler, 2008), and The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005).

Friday morning keynote speaker Marilyn Moats Kennedy took a surprisingly funny take on generational learners and the methods used to supervise and influence them in the workplace. She spoke of management trends as they apply to the generational workers and supervisors. For example, one difference between Baby Boomers and Netsters is in perception: the boss says to a Baby Boomer "Would you mind.....?" The Baby Boomer takes this as an order and does the task. When the boss says the same thing to a Netster, they begin ticking off reasons why they would mind. She also brought back a quote from Star War's Yoda who told Luke Skywalker to "either do or do not. Never try." What a great line. I'd forgotten that one.

I was disappointed to miss the Thursday noon keynote by George Siemens but thoroughly enjoyed his Friday morning forum co-presented with Bonk which I'll summarize in a later post.