I got here, thinking I knew what to expect. I wasn’t wrong, but I am still stunned by the scale of what I am witnessing. To me, living in Buda, TCEA in Austin is a big deal. I forget that San Antonio is an even bigger city, and NECC is a nationwide conference. WOW. I know I am not the first, nor will I be the last to have that reaction, but still, WOW.
I was impressed how smoothly registration went – then I started strolling through the convention center trying to get my bearings. It is so big that I still don’t really have a sense of the layout. I looked at the program for the next three days – it is spiral bound, and that is certainly intimidating.
Into one of the meeting rooms for the ‘How to get the most out of the conference’ orientation. Can’t say I got much out of that – the comedian who was warming us up did a good job of reminding us to have fun at the conference, and the person telling us how to work the reception made some great points about telling us that the food is all over the place, but other than that, I really have no idea where to start.
Time for the opening keynote. We started with a really nice performance by the San Antonio Southwest High School Mariachi, then ISTE’s president, a professor from A&M, made some good points about how to be advocates for change. She said that change comes about when groups of people passionate about something work together. She made 5 points for how to grow as educators
- Be an advocate for change – for student achievement, teacher training, funding (see the ISTE Advocacy Lounge to help lobby for ET funding)
- Share the knowledge and passion- get the word out.
- Showcase student and teacher work in the community – through businesses (visit local Lions Club or C of C meetings?) – podcasts – RSS feeds – websites
- Dream Big
- Use the resources available – use the power of the Internet to network with other passionate people.
Then after some recognitions, it was time for our Keynote. James Surowiecki spoke about the collective intellegence – that is the wisdom of crowds. He gave examples of how when the opinions of diverse crowds was collected and averaged, the average of all the opinions was more often than not much more accurate than the answer of any one of the crowd. He gave examples of crowds estimating the dressed weight of an ox at a county fair, the statistic that on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the ‘Poll the Audience’ answer was correct more than 91% of the time, and the example that when statistics are compiled, the actual performance of horses at a race track are very close to exactly what their odds were. He also discussed how some universities and businnesses (Iowa, Google, Cisco or Siemens) were using electronic markets to predict such things as the results of the presidential elections, the timing of releases of new devevlopments in technology, or the timing of completion of projects, with great success. Google and Wikipedia are two large scale examples of the collective wisdom – one generated by site rankings and the other by self-policing contributions of a collective community.
According to Surowiecki, the collective wisdom of a crowd is very reliable if certain conditions are met.
First, there must be a way to aggregate the individual opinions into a single group opinion.
Second, the group must be diverse. Not only diverse in intellect, or socio-economic status, but diverse in age and amount of experience and problem solving styles. Diversity is important because a group of lower experience or lower IQ may ask questions that a more homogenous group may assume from the get-go and uncover possible solutions that would not otherwise have been considered. More errors may occur, but it will be a wider variety of errors that may cancel each other out and leave the collective wisdom. Homogeneous groups tend to reflect the same opinion from one to the other until the whole group succumbs to groupthink.
He cited studies by Scott Page on problem solving = something I”d like to further research.
He discussed the importance of a ‘Devil’s Advocate’ to toss out opposing positions – to me that is the ‘What if’ question – or the ‘What’s the downside’ – something to reevaluate a set position one more time.
Third, the members of the group must be able to report their opinions independently. If they’re all in the same room they should speak in the reverse order of expertise or power to avoid the less experienced or junior members amending their opinions in response to peer pressure.
He discussed the importance of healthy conflict and arguement in arriving at a decision so that every angle had been examined – that in arguement truth can emerge. Also beware of talkative people who can overshadow the quieter person. He pointed out how technology, especially the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, could act as a mediator that will enable the quiter, less assertive people to have their opinions given equal weight with more assertive or more talkative folks to let the group wisdom emerge.
