How is the CUE conferences like climbing a cliff?

Got back from a relaxing yet invigorating weekend at the CUE conference in Palm Springs, so I'm going to muse a bit about the experience. By the way, the picture to the right is of a hike in Tahquitz Canyon that I did Saturday afternoon after the conference.

Coming into the conference I felt pretty good about my level of technology use and skill with applying it. Last year when I went to CUE, I went immediately into overload. Every presentation taught me so many new things that I couldn't wait to try out. I went home a year ago and created a SecondLife avatar, started a Blog, set up a Del.ic.ious account, and pulled a bunch of RSS feeds together. It took me quite a bit of time to learn how to use these tools and others that I have begun to learn over the last few years. But coming into CUE this year (2008), I felt like I had fairly successfully scrambled up the technology cliff and I was feeling pretty comfortable.

Little did I know that after a bit of plateu there was a whole new cliff just waiting to be scaled. Once again, CUE has presented me with a whole new array of tools to try out and see if I can use in teaching. For example, I had not realized the tremendous capacity of Google Earth especially in regard to all of the layers that are available for exploration. Thank you Alix Pesheette. I also messed around with Maya in a Digital Media Academy presentation, and I bought, er, won the T-shirt, so I am officially a Maya fan. Also played with Flash and looked into using SCORM with Moodle. So, once again I have a lot of work ahead.

However, one thing comes to mind that is obviously very important, how are these great gadgets to be applied so that they really and truly improve learning, not just provide some amusement to the kids that get to play around with them. I have two people to thank for keeping this in the forefront of my thinking - Jerry Ruiz and Bernie Dodge. I work with Jerry, and whenever we would run into each other in the hallway, we would talk about the sessions that we had seen. Jerry tended to assess his sessions on whether the speaker focused on application in the classroom. In talking to him, I realized that most of the sessions that I had been to had not focused on this obviously critical topic.

Luckily, I went to one talk, Bernie Dodge's, where the entire focus was on how to design lessons (the examples given were webquests, but the idea could, of course, be applied to any type of lesson) that prompt higher order mental processes in students. That is, in teaching we provide some input, expect something to happen inside the student's brain (memorization, summarization, etc.) and then students produce an output that shows what they have learned. Bernie Dodge's point was that the design of our input and expectations for output should cause something exciting to happen in the spinning wheels of a child's mind. They should have to make complex decisions and be the Decider!

Ok, gotta go to bed now. This time change is messing me up, but thank you to CUE, to the speakers, and all of those individuals that were inspirational at the conference!