Why don’t teachers know?

So, today I taught a Photo Story/Movie Maker class to a group of teachers. I’m teaching the same class tomorrow.

I asked this morning’s group how many of them had heard of Web 2.0. Exactly ZERO raised their hand.

I went on to explain what it is, how the “new” web is about collaborating and creating content, rather than just sitting back and consuming the content of a few.

It surprised me, I guess, that none of them had heard the “buzzword” that so many of us speak on a daily basis. Why don’t our teachers know what Web 2.0 is? Are we not getting the info out? Are we just showing them the tools without using that phrase? Or is it just that too many teachers are too far out of the loop?

I got great compliments on the class today, but I wonder how many of the teachers will actually create content to put on their website? Is the expectation there at the campus level? If it isn’t, whose responsibility is it to create the expectation?

So many questions, too few answers…

Desk 2.0

I’m looking around my desk today, and I’ve noticed a few things that I thought were worth mentioning.

I still have a bunch of sticky notes plastered all over the place because I don’t really like the computer stickies, and sometimes it’s just easier for me to find a pencil or pen (!) and jot down a note. It bothers me to have them all over my desk, I can’t minimize them, and they’ll bug me until they’re taken care of.

But what I did notice was my pictures. I have pictures of my wife and I, my sister, my best friend and my dog. I also have a few pictures from our honeymoon that I got printed up.

I don’t have any pictures of my daughter.

The pictures from my wedding and my wife’s bridals are ones we had prints of anyway. I just went to the dollar store and bought some cheap frames. But I’ve never gotten prints of pictures of my daughter, even though I have more photos of her than anything else.

It’s just that they’re all digital. My desk is not cluttered with photos of here, instead, they are part my screen saver. Not just any screen saver, either. I have slickr, which pulls pictures from Flickr. I’ve specified for it to pull my pictures with a particular tag that I put on all of my daughter’s pictures, so I’m constantly seeing all the new pictures of my daughter as well as the older ones, which is kind of fun. I don’t need the photos on my desk because they come up two minutes after I stop doing anything on my computer.

I started looking around for other desk 2.0 things, and saw my IP phone, which we’ve just moved to. I also have a dual screen setup, which has spoiled me for any other kind of setup, ever. I can’t do any work without two screens now.

On my two screens, I also have a widget that displays pictures of my daughter, my 5 day forecast, and a couple of toys – a Napolean Dynamite widget and a Montey Python one that spit out quotes when you click them.

I still have a lot of desk 1.0 items scattered around my workspace, too, like two or three calendars, but just because I like the pictures on them. I have a list of all of our campuses and their phone numbers, as well as our school year calendar. It’s easier to have these things at a glance (for me) rather than trying to find them on my desktop and opening a word doc or pdf.

It just makes me wonder, what will desks look like 20 years from now? Will paper still be king, or will we have figured out a way to put all of these things “at a glance” in convenient and easy to get to places on our computer desktops?