Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Curtis Bonk Interview

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For those who may want to catch the archive, here is my interview yesterday with Indiana University professor Curtis Bonk as we chatted for about an hour about a variety of topics including the effects of technologies in Third World countries, the barriers to change in K-12 schools, and what the future might hold for the Web. We also talked at some length about a book he is looking to publish about how learning can be leveraged by the connections we can now make, and about his other new book titled Empowering Online Learning.  He made the point that a lot of folks are making these days, that many of these ideas have been around for a long time, mentioning Seymour Papert and others from 20 and 30 years ago. When we asked him to pull off a few books from his shelf behind him, he grabbed Mindstorms, Apprenticeship in Thinking and some other older but still relevant titles. All in all, it pushed my thinking in some good ways. Enjoy!

Some session notes: Apologies for the choppy audio in the first half; not sure why it mysteriously cleared up all of a sudden. Thanks to everyone in the chat session (about 30 folks) who offered up some great questions, and to Sheryl who moderated. And last, having some trouble converting to MP4 since the .flv file was so big. UStream won’t do the conversion on files over 100MB.

The World is Flat for Education–Curtis Bonk Interview

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Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2 pm EST I’ll be continuing my thread of interviews with authors with Curtis Bonk, professor of e-learning at Indiana University. Curtis has just finished a comprehensive companion to Thomas Friedman’s work that looks at the world through an education slant. His blog has been recounting some of his travels around the world, and he’s got a lot of great stories to share that might give a more global perspective on how this is all playing out. He’s early in the publication process and has some interesting ideas for putting the book out, which will also be fodder for our discussion.

The interview will happen on my Ustream channel, and I hope you’ll join in the conversation. If you have any questions that you’d like to ask, feel free to post them here.

Clay Shirky Interview

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Well, despite some technical issues (Skype video not working behind the NYU firewall (go figure) and just a complete drop of my Internet connection about half way through) here are the 2-part archives of my (or should I say “our”) interview of Clay Shirky along with the at times compelling chat conversation from UStream. (Apologies to those whose questions I didn’t get to; learning…) I’ll compress my thoughts into a later post, but on par, I found the interview itself and the process of doing it pretty interesting. I hope to have some more of these lined up in the coming weeks.

Would love to hear your feedback. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Here is a liveblog of the session from Christy Tucker.

LATER UPDATE: Here are MP4 versions of Part 1 and Part 2. Looks like these links break from time to time; keep trying. And no idea how long UStream will leave them up…

Part 1:

Part 2:

Live Shirky Interview This Thursday 11 am EST

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with Clay Shirky this Thursday at 11 am at my Ustream Channel. I’ll be picking his brain on how what he sees are the educational implications of the changes and shifts set out in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” and I’m hoping you’ll participate as well. Most UStreamers know that there is a chat window that comes with every show, but I’ll also be opening up the cohost feature for those of you with camera and mic that want to come on and ask a question as well. (I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know ahead of time if you plan to do that, just for organization sake.)

If you’d rather just leave a question in this comment thread, I’d be happy to try to work it in.

Hope to see you on Thursday!

UStream Fun

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Kind of spur of the moment I decided to UStream all of my presentations at MICCA in Baltimore, and in the midst of doing so noticed some cool upgrades, the best of which is the ability to “cohost.” (Notice the little link in the bottom left of the picture.) This may not be all that new since I haven’t played much of late, but it was fun to bring all sorts of willing experimenters from the studio audience in to play. Talked to bicyclemark in Amsterdam, a classroom teacher in Wichita, a technology specialist in the UK, and some students in Montgomery, Alabama, pictured here. The folks who were watching seemed to indicate that the sound and picture quality were pretty good, despite some spotty bandwidth yesterday. The only glitch was that when I tried to record those interviews, the “cohost” contributions didn’t stick. It was just me talking and listening, making little sense.

I have to say that UStream has become quite the eye-opener for people in my presentations. It’s definitely an interesting way of positioning the drastic publishing shifts that we are experiencing, and to give a bit of context to the “call for conversations” around them. And on a personal note, it is great to be able to watch/listen to presentations while multitasking in the background.

Now if only UStream would archive the chats…