Reflection of Day 1 of FETC

Day 1 at FETC has come to an end. It started at 5:30 am, when I crawled out of bed at the hotel to get ready and ended around 10:30 pm, when my mind finally settled down and allowed sleep to take over.

The shear size of the conference building in Orlando contributes to the feeling of “Where do I start?” or “How will ever be able to grasp it ALL?”. The conference program does not help in reducing this anxiety. There are so many current sessions that it becomes hard to plan your “itinerary” for the day, Which session to attend? What (and where) is the backup session, in case of a vendor pitch or a BORING presenter who is NOT delivering what the description of his session promised? How to choose, if there are two or three presentation titles that interest you are at the same time? Who creates those programs and time assignments anyway? Who chooses to accept proposals to this conference?
All in all the excitement of being at the conference is pretty high. You can feel it as soon as you walk up the stairs and a sticker on the door announces Wifi throughout the conference center.

So, what did I take away from this first day at FETC?

My head is swirling with all the different sessions that I attended (and I attended a session in each time slot), I am starting to hear and think myself say: “I don’t remember who said this, but…” quiet a lot. Please bear with me that I might not credit all the presenters for their ideas and thoughts that are coming together in my mind when trying to reflect on this day. I did make at effort to live-blog each session I attended in order to be able to have online notes of the presentation for myself, as well as allow others who were not present share the moment.

Where do I start? How to bring order to all the ideas, thoughts, and topics that are all over the place in my head?

Global Awareness & Collaboration
We are in a flat world. No matter if the term has been overused. It is not going away. We have to prepare ourselves, our colleagues at ALL levels of education, and our students to be able to function in a world that does not recognize the traditional boundaries and borders. Global awareness is more important than ever when collaborating with people from all over the world. Knowledge of different time zones, traditions, holidays, politics and history of other countries suddenly are vital in an effort of bringing in a new perspective, to break stereotypes, and broadening horizons.
The message is loud and clear: Why would you NOT take advantage of collaborating with experts, teachers, students, business that are around the world, when they are only a (free) Skype call, a (free) google document or a (free) Voicethread away?

I heard from Alan November that we need to teach students global work ethics. We need to take other points of view into consideration when researching. He used the example of the pope making a speech and “mis” quoting a Moslem leader, which resulted in an outcry of the Moslem community. He challenged us to research about this particular incident. Most of us would search in search engines like Google, Yahoo or Alta Vista, returning with results that most likely would be originating from sources within the USA. Is that the only (correct) point of view? We need to include searches that will return results from other countries to HEAR their voices.

What I missed Alan talk about, is the importance of being able to speak, read and understand in ANOTHER language. If you are searching for the other perspective, you cannot stop with results that are written by a certain group of people within a country (the ones speaking English as their foreign language). To get the real story, thoughts, background of the issue, you need to be able to meet them on their terms, in their language.

Nelson Mandela says

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.

If you want to take these other voices into consideration, you need to speak “THEIR language” If you acknowledge the existence of “there is more than one side to the story”, you also need to hear native voices. Part of our efforts to global awareness and collaboration NEED to include language and cultural studies. We need to include and address the monolingual society here in the United States when speaking about global work ethics and awareness.
All of this is really hard to teach to the students, if teachers, administrators and parents don’t have a global perspective and work ethic. How can you teach it, if you don’t have the awareness yourself?

Another theme I am seeing emerge in some of the sessions is the importance of collaborative knowledge and social networking. I say some of the sessions, because I am astonished how MANY sessions that I am attending are not in the same 2.0 universe that I am in. I am also a little disappointed that the focus is on the session and there is no “scheduled” time to network. No blogger or twitter cafe.

When I first attended FETC a few years ago, I was so thrilled to be around people who I could identify with in terms of technology and passion of using it. I don’t have that feeling this year when I sit in session where few attendees raise their hand when asked if they blog, twitter, Skype, know what voicethread is and sound like they hear for the first time about tools like Skype. I don’t want to sound arrogant (and I had a short discussion with Dean Shareski about these observations too), but I know that I am lonely and “out” there regarding how much technology plays part in my professional and personal life. I know that I am “different” in my own school. I know that we (who blog, twitter, skype at a moments notice across the world )are a minority among the teaching community. I was VERY surprised though to find out that I still feel “out” there among the 10,000 attendees of FETC.

One of my highlights on Day One was listening to Alan November and meet Twitter followers f2f like Dean Shareski, Marie Coleman, Karen Kliegman, Kathy Shields and Steve Dembo. I hope to connect with others today.

[tag] FETC08 [/tag]