My trip to ISTE 2012 in San Diego involved a stay in Ocean Beach, a beach-side community in the city of San Diego that has it's own distinct style.

The area has a pretty strong identity and a strong sense of history, even if most of it is in the modern era. When new curb cuts were put in, they left the original cement stamps in for the sidewalks:

Most days, I took public transit into the convention area. The bus system ran about every 30 minutes, and you could check the arrival time via SMS. Android users can also ask for transit directions in the navigation app.

Multi-passes can be a more cost efficient and handier way to travel

Here are some ocean photos:

The ISTE 2012 conference was a varied ecosystem, it felt like a hierarchical free zone in which both the intellectual highs of research based learning and teaching pedagogy are presented and fervently discussed alongside the appropriation of hipster bravado and merriment. They coexist because learning was still extent for either approach to presenting. Just as our students need variety and a shifting of traditional learning with more accessible and motivating playfulness. It reminds me that in our classrooms we have the traditional text, a container of meaning which both students and teachers can feel is safe side by side with having our students use the Internet for finding information in which another layer of sophistication or lens needs to be applied. We have teachers wearing ties and following traditional methods but also incorporating gaming, media, remixing all happening at the same time.

In one day I went from seeing Gary Stager adamantly pushing for the classrooms many of us desire in which invention and creativity solve all the learning goals that my students must achieve during the course of the year with authentic problem solving. In particular the robot ballerina stands out as Stager pointed out the mirroring of robot by the little girl's body movement as an important developmental cue. Afterwards I went to the Hollywood Squares session in which educators dressed as stars and the questions asked had to do with recalling or figuring out key statements made from various Youtube or TED presentations. 

One of my favorite sessions because it seemed so relevant to the needs of my own district and its inability to push for innovation outside individual classrooms was Suzie Boss's session. I loved the session because it focussed on a district's model for bringing innovation and a creative focus for the students even with a varied demographic environment.  There were principals present and she Skyped in Pam Moran the superintendent. I created a Storify session to save some of the discussion. Hopefully this sort of presentation is a harbinger of positive change for larger systems such as districts that all together embrace a different way of thinking.

My perspective overall was fairly restricted as I had family that would wait until I could get away and take them to one of the many fun family activities in the San Diego area. I would usually leave in the late morning or early afternoon so there is much I missed, but still I then would periodically check in on Twitter following the #iste12 hashtag.

The nexus for me as usual was the Blogger's Cafe, where those who are there are accessible and amenable to interaction, but the whole sails pavilion seemed to promote the informal and social type of interactions with people that the Blogger's cafe is there for. 

I had volunteered to help at the Newbie Lounge which Beth Still  had organized as well as donated to her "Send a Newbie to ISTE" project. and as a result ended up talking to various people. I spoke with an educator from South America, also spoke briefly with the founder of Edshelf, Mike Lee, and finally was able to meet @cybraryman/Jerry Blemengarten

The flipped classroom label was so prevalent that I couldn't get a sense of who was really up and modeling the best or most innovative methods, but I did meet Ramsey Musallam who has the website Flipteaching and 

who has done his graduate work on the subject and has a large set of research information accessible and linked off his website.

Along with the rockstar sessions and the discussion about who are the rockstars I had a sense that people are experimenting with the image of who a teacher is and how we represent our selves. It was interesting to see the #edubros inviting Ken Robinson to join them and their was the group  ESSDACK out of Kansas with Kevin Honeycutt and Ginger Lewman and their techtoos and lanyard/badge bling that teachers need never fear about being relevant, dynamic, and fresh to our students.  

I was glad that companies (such as Classdojo, Classconnect, Educreations) who progressed under the Silicon Valley education start-up support/funding group Imagine K12 were well represented. I spoke to someone from Class dojo and saw that Classroom Connect was dispensing hugs and love to anyone who wanted it by the trolley station outside the conference. Hopefully more young startups which foster those types of direct relationships and interactions will continue to foster more innovative software or apps that we can use in our classrooms. I didn't see Voicethread on the vendor floor which is too bad.

There were a lot of people I missed either because they weren't there or because I just never crossed paths with them. These people made the conference feel like a somewhat incomplete experience by my not getting to interact face to face with them.

There have been several good blog posts that have popped up in my RSS reader or were shared. Of the posts I read so far I think John Spencer gives voice to two critical areas of need to moving more schools forward which is professional development and giving teachers the opportunity to fail. With all the cut backs and hight stakes testing we must invest time and effort in both these areas. Also Jeff Uttecht posted about the need to realistically help the systems around us evolve after listening at a conference such as ISTE to more radical proposals for change that involve revolution. I wish his ideas didn't resonate with me and that we could just dump all the useless obstructions to where we want to take our classroom, but he is right. Both these posts remind me of the importance of going back and working with the teachers around me for whom small incremental steps either with technology or student centered learning are what they need to see. We are in a system which values consistency and staying the course. Once something works there is hesitancy to change.

Responding to Vicki Davis and her #istebig3 tag requests and my top three takeaways or things I want to continue to learn and pursue

1. I love common core

At a national conference I was able to begin discussing standards that are going to be affecting almost all teachers in the U.S. Who's to say that as new ideas are created at a national level that foundations and organizations which promote authentic project based learning, that teachers cannot join together with them to create a more powerful and influential voice towards moving our classrooms in new directions.

2. I want a classroom of inventors, creators, engineers

I want to continue to work towards making authentic learning experiences in which my students are directing their learning in meaningful ways. I hope I'm able to glean more ideas from sources that promote problem solvers, makers, and doers.

3. I am a curator.

As I was thinking and documenting what was happening around me trying to collect it and keep from being overwhelmed, Miguel Guhlin posted a couple of posts about content curation tools and I realized during the school year that my use of paper.li, scoop it, pinterest, tweeted times, Zite, related to the curation and sharing of content. My sense of accomplishment and purposefulness was just as great as if I was creating new content or generating new ideas. At the conference I'm always trying to give voice on twitter to concepts that I want to remember.

I was saddened to read that all of Richard Byrnes sessions were rejected for ISTE which I'm guessing was the primary reason he was not attending this year.

I just came back from my first ever ISTE conference. And WOW. What a firehose of great people, great information, and great feedback. A fire hose that also greatly exhausted many of the conferencer goers with whom I spoke. By the last day, the lounge chairs were littered with nappers. I'll bet this is how many felt:

I came away with this takeaway for educators: quality is better than quantity. Let me explain.

Pick just 2-3 technologies or techniques you learned and master them. It is not realistic to do everything. If you try, you'll overwhelm yourself and do them all poorly. Focusing on just a few will be an easier way to deal with the ISTE fire hose.

Volunteer. You will meet some fantastic people and have fascinating conversations. One organizer told me how a long-time member felt volunteering & attending fewer sessions was more rewarding than tackling the conference head-on. Also, you get a free t-shirt!

Relax at the lounges. Lounges & gathering areas are great for relaxing and getting into some enlightening discussions. For me, the Newbie Lounge was fantastic. Asking, "Are you a newbie too?" is an easy ice-breaker too.

The common thread to all of these is favoring quality over quantity. Quality experiences, quality relationships, quality conversations. That beats being overwhelmed by activity, I'd say.

For edshelf, this means adding a better way to present just one or two featured tools, instead of an overwhelming number of them. We're currently working on a redesign that will do just that.

Oh, and I had one more takeaway:

Student projects rock. Sorry adults, but the poster sessions of student work stole the show for me. And as one teacher told me, "Isn't that why we're here? To celebrate and learn how we can better educate our students?"

Thank you, ISTE, for putting on a great conference! I look forward to ISTE 2013.

Calvin: "I've decided to stop caring about things. If you care, you just get disappointed all the time. If you don't care, nothing matters, so you're never upset. From now on, my rallying cry is, 'So What?!'" Hobbes: "That's a tough cry to rally around." Calvin: "So what?!"

The original Calvin and Hobbes strip is more of a snarky commentary on Gen X, I think, but I think the same holds true for some cries I'd like people to rally around. "So what" is one of them, in its earnest form. Another is "depends."

Was struck, after writing my aphorism post, by some of the claims by a keynote speaker at the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference, Yong Zhao. A few examples that flooded the #iste12 tag on Twitter:

(1) Literacy shouldn't be the national goal; it should be the floor, not the ceiling.

I'm probably in philosophical agreement with this, if we can assume that the definition of "literacy" above is limited to simple comprehension of written text and not the expanded conception of literacy practices in media literacy. (The way I would put it is, "this type of literacy is the floor, this type is the ceiling"; but all that says is that there is a developmental spectrum for learning that needs to accomodate both simple and complex skills.)

But this is also deceptively perverse thing to say given the actual state of literacy in the country, and given whom phrases like "the state of literacy" tends to affect. I don't think anyone would look at schools that are genuinely struggling with print literacy among their students and say, "we just need to raise the ceiling for these kids." There are myriad factors that actually keep literacy low in particular schools, and they're connected to other factors, like parental involvement in the home, access to reading material, and other social issues closely related to (for one thing, if not technically the only thing) poverty. The fact of the matter is that the kid who spends a lot of time reading at home, with parents who read to her, will most of the time be able to read at a far higher level of fluency than the kid who doesn't. That is to say that in the U.S., many affluent students are already born with high floors before they enter school and many low-income students are not. It is the school's primary responsibility to provide that floor -- it's the basis of a functioning democratic education system.

(2) Test scores do not show your teaching ability, your student's learning, or the quality of your school.

AND

Education is not about fixing someone's deficits, it's about enhancing their strengths.

Depends. Students who can't pass the "floor" reading tests are most likely actually struggling with reading. They do have a deficit that needs to be "fixed," along with the many strengths that also need to be enhanced, perhaps to spur their motivation to continue developing their literacy skills. Students who struggle with standardized reading questions also struggle with any form of reading. It would be more difficult for this student to read a news article, a book for pleasure, ad copy on a website. As I said in a previous post, it's likely that "better" or "more accurate" standardized tests would actually be much harder for students most at risk.

(3) Think about everyone as entrepreneurs: black collar creative workers [a reference to Steve Jobs's iconic turtleneck] who create jobs for themselves.

AND

PISA [Program for International Student Assessment, an international reading/math competence assessment] scores are negatively correlated with global entrepreneurial success.

These are both simple (and common) cries to rally around, but they're both wrong. The misguided focus on entrepreneurial innovation is most likely appealing to people's visceral "like" of exceptional celebrities like Steve Jobs or Lady Gaga (also mentioned) or the Apple brand. Steve Jobs, being an exceptional person who may have also benefited from a historical bubble of tech innovation, is not replicable. But if we put Steve Jobs in relation to learning and entrepreneurship, we answer the easier question: "Do I like Steve Jobs? Doesn't that mean I would like more of him?" But that doesn't answer more important questions, like: Was Steve Jobs who he was precisely because it would be impossible for there to be another one? Do we actually need more entrepreneurs? (Recent research suggests that, e.g., venture capitalists never actually recovered after the dot-com crash, and that our perception of their importance or success is for the most part a fiction.)

The actual PISA results [PDF] are widely divergent in areas with high wealth inequality like the U.S. Poor schools in the U.S. are dead last in reading and math, a far cry from the U.S. overall average (#17) and an even farther cry from the reading average among the most affluent U.S. schools (under 10% free and reduced lunch), which is #2, after Shanghai. That is to say that the U.S. has both the best and the worst schools in the world.

(4) Creativity can't be taught, but it can be killed.

A silly aphorism. Compare: "Creativity can be taught, but it can't be killed." The latter is probably the more relevant aphorism for teachers, whose job it most certainly is to foster creativity. Some students are auto-didacts, but most aren't, and good teaching does spur and build children's creativity. I don't see how a teacher could function in the classroom if, at some level, he or she did not believe this to be true. (Well, I can imagine it -- that teacher would simply look for what they believe to be the "naturally creative" ones at the expense of everyone else. I've seen this happen many times, always to the detriment of student learning. It's easy teaching -- assuming that some kids "get it" and some kids "don't" -- and completely antithetical to collaborative learning. It's why I don't assign "directors" or "group leaders" in production or writing courses.)