This was my fifth ISTE this year, and it was a fantastic experience. On a personal level, I kept insanely busy, doing work as a presenter / facilitator with the Leadership Bootcamp, CoSN’s CTO Forum, the Online Learning Institute and my own session, but I also was able to attend sessions led by Bernie Dodge, Howard Rheingold, Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss, Jeff Mao and I spent a lot of time in the poster sessions, talking to students and educators about their ideas and projects. In between, I caught up with old friends, met with new collaborators, listened to folks who have an ear on the policy world of Washington, DC and even snuck off to watch the USA soccer match. (I’m still not over that loss. What a great team we had this year.)

I took tons of notes in sessions… from Bernie Dodge, I was able to deepen my thoughts about the relationship between engagement and empowerment. Bernie’s work has been important to me for over a decade now, and his thoughts about being savvy and careful about what we consider "the engaged learner" caused me to reflect on the "Shifting Ground" piece I wrote for Principal Leadership magazine back in the fall. More than ever, I believe deeply that engagement is a step to what we really want to see from our students — empowerment.

From Jeff Mao I was able to compare the state-wide roll out the Maine 1:1 laptop project to our 500 student laptop program. It was fascinating to me to hear how so much of the Maine roll out had incredible common cause with what we do at SLA. (It probably shouldn’t. I leaned heavily on the Maine resources when we were starting SLA, but both Maine’s and our ideas have evolved since then.) The biggest "aha" take-away came when Jeff talked about how (most? many?) schools in Maine do a parent workshop on the laptops and what it means to give them out as they allocate them. We don’t explicitly do that, simply because we never thought of that. Marcie and I talked about that idea after the session, and we will be doing that this year. I wonder how many of the hiccups we see in 9th grade around laptop use we can mitigate with better pro-active parent education.

Jane and Suzie’s session is going to get its own blog post, because it was just so rich and so very important to the work we do at SLA. They ran a session on the inquiry process as the foundation of project-based learning. There will be more on this later, but it was just lovely for me to take part and look at inquiry through their lens. There was, not surprisingly, incredible common ground, but there were new "tricks of the trade," and I’ve got a new book for my reading list – "Change by Design" by Tim Brown of IDEO. His ideas about the perfect brainstorm could have great resonance in our classes, and I look forward to taking it back to SLA.

Howard Rheingold’s session on developing our students’ (and our) CRAP detectors was an engaging and interesting session that, more than anything else, showed how even a visionary like Howard Rheingold has asked himself what are the limits of the ideas he champions the most. For him to have to deal with the distractions of the laptop in the classroom and to be frustrated by it was really interesting. There’s more to unpack there too.

There’s more specific detail, of course, but those are the big session reflections. I was really happy to spend so much time this year back in sessions. I have a strategy that I’m not going into those sessions looking for the "big" moment, but I want to honor all the small moments of learning that allow me to shift or deepen my thoughts, and I felt that in every session I went to. That’s a great feeling to walk away from ISTE with.

And the general feel of ISTE was different for me this year. There was no big new social tool like Twitter that everyone was trying to learn. (Although, the iPad was clearly the "new" technology. There were hundreds of them.) This year, to me, it felt like there was a deepening at work. People weren’t running around as much for what’s new. Many of the people I talked to were looking to figure out how to make sense of what they already had learned.

Perhaps this was the year we won the ‘battle of the tool.’ This year, I didn’t hear anywhere near as much of the ‘What is… X,’ instead I heard more debate about the efficacy of the use of tools in various places. That’s good. That’s healthy. Smart, rational people should disagree about that. We should be striving and straining to figure out what this really looks like if we get good at it. That’s a community growing up and getting ready to take on a larger role in the national education debate. Good.

And perhaps a last thought on that. Now isn’t the time to settle for easy answers to those questions. The easy work is either largely done. People know online learning, social networking, blogging and wikis exist. Now we have to decide what we believe about those things… how, where and why they can – and can’t – be used… what we gain and lose when we use them… and what school might look like when we do. These answers aren’t easy and facile. And we are going to need leaders who define visions of education that have a defining pedagogy that take us to transformative places. The community of people I saw at ISTE this year is ready for that conversation. Let’s have at it.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad